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©C1K169280 







HE RAISED A GULL-LIKE CRY IN THE 
HUMP LIKE A SNOWHILL ! IT IS 


AIR. 

MOBY 


“THERE SHE BLOWS 

I > > 

DICK ! 


Dodd j Mead & Company, Inc . 

THERE SHE BLOWS! A 

Page 499 


MOBY DICK 

OR 

THE WHITE WHALE 



HERMAN MEIVILLE 

ILLUSTRATED BY 
MEAD SCHAEFFER 


NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, 

MCMXXII 








f 







i 





















IN TOKEN 


OF MY ADMIRATION FOR HIS GENIUS 
THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED 
TO 


NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 










































































































■ 



























. 


















































































CONTENTS 


chapter page 

I Loomings 1 

II The Carpet-Bag 6 

III The Spouter-Inn 9 

IV The Counterpane 22 

V Breakfast 26 

VI The Street 28 

VII The Chapel 30 

VIII The Pulpit 33 

IX The Sermon 36 

X A Bosom Friend 44 

XI Nightgown 48 

XII Biographical 50 

XIII Wheelbarrow 52 

XIV Nantucket 56 

XV Chowder 58 

XVI The Ship 61 

XVII The Ramadan 74 

XVIII His Mark 79 

XIX The Prophet 82 

XX All Astir 86 

XXI Going Aboard 88 

XXII Merry Christmas 91 

XXIII The Lee Shore 95 

XXIV The Advocate 96 

XXV Knights and Squires 100 

XXVI Knights and Squires 103 

XXVII Ahab 107 

XXVIII Enter Ahab; to him, Stubb Ill 

XXIX The Pipe 114 

XXX Queen Mab 114 

XXXI Cetology 116 

XXXII The Specksynder 129 

XXXIII The Cabin Table 132 

XXXIV The Masthead 137 

XXXV Tiie Quarter-Deck 143 

XXXVI Sunset 151 

XXXVII Dusk 152 

XXXVIII First Night-Watch 153 

XXXIX Midnight. — Forecastle 154 

XL Moby Dick 161 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

XLI The Whiteness of the Whale 170 

XLII Hark! 178 

XLIII The Chart 179 

XLIV The Affidavit 184 

XLY Surmises 192 

XLYI The Mat-Maker 195 

XLYII The First Lowering 197 

XLYIII The Hyena 207 

XLIX Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah 209 

L The Spirit-Spout 212 

LI The Albatross 215 

LII The Gam 217 

LIII The Town-11 o’s Story 221 

LIY Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales . . . 241 

LY Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and 

the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes . . . 246 

LYI Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in 

Sheet-iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars 249 

LVII Brit . 251 

LYIII Squid 254 

LIX The Line 256 

LX Stubb Kills a Whale 260 

LXI The Dart 265 

LXII The Crotch 266 

LXIII Stubb’s Supper 268 

LXIY The Whale as a Dish 275 

LXY. The Shark Massacre 277 

LXYI Cutting-in 279 

LXYII The Blanket 281 

LXYIII The Funeral 284 

LXIX The Sphinx 285 

LXX The Jeroboam’s Story 287 

LXXI The Monkey-Bope 293 

LXXII Stubb and Flask Kill a Eight Whale; and then 

have a Talk over Him 297 

LXX III The Sperm Whale’s Head. — Contrasted Yiew . 303 

LXXIV The Eight Whale’s Head. — Contrasted Yiew . 307 

LX XV The Battering-Eam 310 

LXXYI The Great Heidelburgh Tun . . . . . . .312 

LXXYII Cistern and Buckets 314 

LXXVIII The Prairie 318 

LXXIX The Nut 320 

LXXX The Pequod Meets the Virgin 323 

LXXXI The Honour and Glory of Whaling .... 333 

LXXXII Jonah Historically Eegarded 336 

LXXXIII Pitchpoling 338 

LXXXIY The Fountain 340 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

LXXXV The Tail 346 

LXXXYI The Grand Armada 350 

LXXXYII Schools and Schoolmasters 362 

LXXXYIII Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish 365 

LXXXIX Heads or Tails 369 

XC The Peqvod Meets the Rosebud 371 

XGI Ambergris 37'8 

XCII The Castaway 380 

XCIII A Squeeze of the Hand 384 

XCIY The Cassock 387 

XCY The Try-Works 389 

XCYI The Lamp 393 

XCYII Stowing down and Clearing up 394 

XCYIII The Doubloon 396 

XCIX Leg and Arm. — The Peqvod of Nantucket Meets 

the Samuel Enderby of London * 402 

C The Decanter 409 

Cl A Bower in the Arsacides 414 

CII Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton . . . 418 

CIII The Fossil Whale 420 

CIY Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? — Will 

pie Perish? 424 

CY Ahab’s Leg ! 428 

CYI The Carpenter 430 

CYII Ahab and the Carpenter 433 

CYIII Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin 437 

CIX Queequeg in his Coffin 439 

CX The Pacific 444 

CXI The Blacksmith 446 

CXII The Forge 448 

CXIII The Gilder 451 

CXIY The Peqvod Meets the Bachelor 453 

CXY The Dying Whale 455 

CXYI The Whale Watch 457 

CXYII The Quadrant 458 

CXYIII The Candles 460 

CXIX The Deck Towards the End of the First Night 

Watch 467’ 

CXX Midnight. — The Forecastle Bulwarks .... 467 

CXXI Midnight Aloft. — Thunder and Lightning . . 469 

CXXII The Musket 469 

CXXIII The Needle 472 

CXXIY The Log and Line 476 

CXXY The Lifebuoy 479 

CXXYI The Deck 482 

CXX VII The Pequod Meets the Rachel 484 

CXXVIII The Cabin 488 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

CXXIX The Hat 489 

CXXX The Pequod Meets the Delight 493 

CXXXI The Symphony 495 

CXXXII The Chase — First Day 498 

CXXXIII The Chase— Second Day 507 

CXXXI Y The Chase— Third Day .516 

APPENDIX 

Etymology 527 

Extracts 528 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

He raised a gull-like cry in the air. “There she blows — there she 

blows ! A hump like a snowhill ! It is Moby Dick !” Frontispiece 

FACING 

PAGE 

“Come along then; do come; won’t ye come?” 16 

I tore from her, and with a sudden bodily rush dashed myself full 

against the mark 76 

Foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehensions; Cap- 
tain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck fl08 

“D’ye mark him, Flask?” whispered Stubb; “the chick that’s in him 

pecks the shell. ’Twill soon be out.” 144 

“Pull, pull, my fine hearts alive; pull, my children; pull, my little 

ones 1” 200 

Ishmael tells the Town-Ho’s story 222 

And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed 

them aside with his floundering feet 296 

The Malays are after us 354 

Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt . .382 

“There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that 

is lord over the Pequod — On deck!” . 438 

During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the 
Pequod' s jawbone tiller had several times been reelingly hurled 
to the deck 470 



MOBY DICK; OR 
THE WHITE WHALE 


CHAPTER I 

LOOMINGS 

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — 
having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to 
interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the 
watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, 
and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim 
about the mouth; whenever it is damp, drizzly November in my soul; 
whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, 
and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet ; and especially when- 
ever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong 
moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, 
and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high 
time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol 
and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his 
sword ; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. 
If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, 
cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. 

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by 
wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs — commerce surrounds it with 
her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme 
down- town is the Battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, 
and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of 
land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there. 

Circumambulate the city on a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from 
Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, north- 

1 


2 


MOBY DICK; OR 

ward. What do you see? — Posted like silent sentinels all around the 
town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean rev- 
eries. Some leaning against the piles ; some seated upon the pier-heads ; 
some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft 
in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But 
these are all landsmen ; of week days pent up in lath and plaster — tied 
to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this ? 
Are the green fields gone ? What do they here ? 

But look ! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and 
seemingly hound for a dive. Strange ! Nothing will content them but 
the extremest limit of the land ; loitering under the shady lee of yonder 
warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water 
as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand — miles 
of them — leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, 
streets and avenues — north, east, south, and west-. Yet here they all 
unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the com- 
passes of all those ships attract them thither? 

Once more. Say, you are in the country ; in some high land of lakes. 
Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down 
in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic 
in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest 
reveries — stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will 
infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should 
you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, 
if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. 
Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever. 

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadi- 
est, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the 
valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There 
stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix 
were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; 
and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant 
woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of moun- 
tains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus 
tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon 
this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were 
fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, 


3 


THE WHITE WHALE 

when for scores on scores of miles yon wade knee-deep among Tiger- 
lilies — what is the one charm wanting? — Water — there is not a drop 
of water there ! Were Niagara bnt a cataract of sand, would you travel 
your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, 
upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to 
buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedes- 
trian trip to Rockaway Beach ? Why is almost every robust boy with a 
robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea ? 
Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a 
mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now 
out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? 
Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? 
Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning 
of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tor- 
menting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was 
drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and 
oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this 
is the key to it all. 

Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever 
I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over-conscious of 
my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a 
passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and 
a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, pas- 
sengers get seasick — grow quarrelsome — don’t sleep of nights — do not 
enjoy themselves much, as a general thing; — no, I never go as a passen- 
ger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a 
commodore, or a captain, or a cook. I abandon the glory and distinc- 
tion of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate 
all honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind 
whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, 
without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. 
And as for going as cook, — though I confess there is considerable glory 
in that, a cook being a sort of officer on shipboard — yet, somehow, I 
never fancied broiling fowls; — though once broiled, judiciously but- 
tered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will 
speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than 
I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon 


4 


MOBY DICK; OR 

broiled ibis and roasted river-horse, that you see the mummies of those 
creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids. 

No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, 
plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal masthead. True, 
they rather order me about, and make me jump from spar to spar, like 
a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is 
unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honour, particularly if 
you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, 
or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to 
putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country 
schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transi- 
tion is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and re- 
quires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin 
and bear it. But even this wears off in time. 

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a 
broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount 
to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Who is not 
a slave ? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may 
order me about — however they may thump and punch me about, I have 
the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right: that everybody else is 
one way or other served in much the same way — either in a physical or 
metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is 
passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, 
and be content. 

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of 
paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single 
penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves 
must pay: and there is all the difference in the world between paying 
and being paid. The urbane activity with which a man receives money 
is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to 
be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a moneyed man 
enter heaven. Ah ! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition ! 

Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome ex- 
ercise and pure air of the forecastle deck. For as in this world, head 
winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you 
never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the commo- 
dore on the quarterdeck gets his atmosphere at secondhand from the sail- 


THE WHITE WHALE 


5 


ors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In 
much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other 
things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore 
it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I 
should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage ; this the in- 
visible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of 
me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way 
— he can better answer than anyone else. I take it that this part of the 
bill of these three mysterious ladies must have run something like this : 

“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States. 
“whaling voyage by one ishmael. 

“BLOODY BATTLE IH AFFGHANISTAH .” 

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, 
the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when 
others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short 
and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces — though 
I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the cir- 
cumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which 
being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me 
to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the 
delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiassed free- 
will and discriminating judgment. 

Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great 
whale himself. ’Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all 
my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his 
island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, 
with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and 
sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, 
such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am 
tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail 
forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Hot ignoring what is 
good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be sociable with 
it — would they let me — since it is but well to be on friendly terms with 
alj the inmates of the place one lodges in. 


6 


MOBY DICK; OR 

By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; 
the great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild 
conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into 
my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, midmost of them 
all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air. 


CHAPTER II 

THE CAKPET-BAG 

I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my 
arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good 
city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in Hew Bedford. It was on a 
Saturday night in December. Much was I disappointed upon learn- 
ing that the little packet for Hantucket had already sailed, and that 
no way of reaching that place would offer, till the following Monday. 

As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling 
stop at this same Hew Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it 
may as well be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For 
my mind was made up to sail in no other than a Hantucket craft, 
because there was a fine boisterous something about everything con- 
nected with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me. Be- 
sides, though Hew Bedford has of late been gradually monopolising 
the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Hantucket 
is now much behind her, yet Hantucket was her great original — the 
Tyre of this Carthage ; — the place where the first dead American whale 
was stranded. Where else but from Hantucket did those aboriginal 
whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the 
Leviathan? And where but from Hantucket, too, did that first ad- 
venturous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported cobble- 
stones — so goes the story — to throw at the whales, in order to discover 
when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the bowsprit ? 

How having a night, a day, and still another night, following before 
me in Hew Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it became 
a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It 
was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly 
cold and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grap- 


THE WHITE WHALE 7 

nels I had sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of 
silver. “So, wherever you go, Ishmael,” said I to myself as I stood 
in the middle of a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing 
the gloom towards the north with the darkness towards the south — 
“wherever in your wisdom you may conclude to lodge for the night, my 
dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire the price, and don’t be too particular.” 

With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of “The 
Crossed Harpoons” — but it looked too expensive and jolly there. 
Farther on, from the bright red windows of the “Sword-Fish Inn,” 
there came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed 
snow and ice from before the house, for everywhere else the congealed 
frost lay ten inches thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement, — rather weary 
for me, when I struck my foot against the flinty projections, because 
from hard, remorseless service the soles of my boots were in a most 
miserable plight. “Too expensive and jolly, again,” thought I, paus- 
ing one moment to watch the broad glare in the street, and hear the 
sounds of the tinkling glasses within. “But go on, Ishmael,” said I 
at last ; “don’t you hear ? get away from before the door ; your patched 
boots are stopping the way.” So on I went. I now by instinct fol- 
lowed the streets that took me waterward, for there, doubtless, were 
the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns. 

Such dreary streets ! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, 
and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about a tomb. At 
this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of the 
town proved all but deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light 
proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which stood in- 
vitingly open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for the uses 
of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over 
an ashbox in the porch. “Ha !” thought I, “ha,” as the flying particles 
almost choked me, “are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomor- 
rah ? But ‘The Crossed Harpoons,’ and ‘The Sword-Fish’ ? — this, then, 
must needs be the sign of ‘The Trap.’ ” However, I picked myself 
up and hearing a loud voice within, pushed on and opened a second, 
interior door. 

It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred 
black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black 
Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church ; 


8 


MOBY DICK; OK 

and the preacher’s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the 
weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. “Ha, Ishmael,” mut- 
tered I, backing out, “wretched entertainment at the sign of ‘The 
Trap’ !” 

Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of outhanging light not far 
from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking 
up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, 
faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words 
underneath — “The Spouter-Inn : — Peter Coffin.” 

“Coffin ? — Spouter ? — Bather ominous in that particular connection,” 
thought I. “But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I 
suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there.” As the light 
looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the 
dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might have been 
carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging 
sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was 
the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee. 

It was a queer sort of place — a gable-ended old house, one side 
palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak 
corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howl- 
ing than ever it did about St. Paul’s tossed craft. Euroclydon, never- 
theless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one indoors, with his feet 
on the hob quietly toasting for bed. “In judging of that tempestuous 
wind called Euroclydon,” says an old writer — of whose works I possess 
the only copy extant — “it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou 
lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the out- 
side, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the 
frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier.” 
True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind — old 
black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and 
this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn’t stop up the 
chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and 
there. But it’s too late to make any improvements now. What a fine 
frosty night ; how Orion glitters ; what northern lights ! Let them talk 
of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories ; give me 
the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals. 


THE WHITE WHALE 

CHAPTER III 


9 


THE SPOUTER-INN 

Entering that gabled-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, 
low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of 
the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very 
large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that 
in the unequal cross-light? by which you viewed it, it was only by 
diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful in- 
quiry of the neighbours, that you could any way arrive at an under- 
standing of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and 
shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, 
in the time of the Ne w England hags, had endeavoured to delineate 
chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and 
oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little win- 
dow towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion 
that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted. 

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, por- 
tentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture 
over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. 
A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man 
distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimagi- 
nable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily 
took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting 
meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas ! deceptive idea would dart 
you through. — It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale. — It’s the un- 
natural combat of the four primal elements. — It’s a blasted heath. — It’s 
a Hyperborean winter scene. — It’s the breaking-up of the ice-bound 
stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one por- 
tentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and 
all the rest were plain. But stop ; does it not bear a faint resemblance 
to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself? 

In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, 
partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with 
whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape- 
Homer in a great hurricane; the half -foundered ship weltering there 


10 


MOBY DICK; OR 

with its three dismantled masts alone visible ; and an exasperated whale, 
purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of im- 
paling himself upon the three mastheads. 

The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish 
array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with 
glittering teeth resembling ivory saws ; others were tufted with knots of 
human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping 
round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed 
mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous 
cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such 
a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with these were rusty old 
whaling lances and harpoons all broken and deformed. Some were 
storied weapons. With this once long lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty 
years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and 
a sunset. And that harpoon — so like a corkscrew now — was flung in 
Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years afterwards slain off 
the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like 
a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty 
feet, and at last was found imbedded in the hump. 

Crossing this dusky Imtry, and on through yon low-arched way — cut 
through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with 
fireplaces all round — you enter the public room. A still duskier place 
is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled 
planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some old craft’s 
cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored 
old ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a long, low, shelf-like 
table covered with cracked glass-cases, filled with dusty rarities, 
gathered from this wide world’s remotest nooks. Projecting from the 
farther angle of the room stands a dark-looking den — the bar — a rude 
attempt at a right whale’s head. Be that how it may, there stands the 
vast arched bone of the whale’s jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive 
beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decan- 
ters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, bustles a 
little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors 
deliriums and death. 

Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. 
Though true cylinders without — within, the villainous green goggling 


THE WHITE WHALE 


11 


glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel 
meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads’ goblets. 
Fill to this mark, and your charge is but a penny ; to this a penny more ; 
and so on to the full glass — the Cape Horn measure, which you may 
gulp down for a shilling. 

Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered 
about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of Shrim- 
shander. I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accom- 
modated with a room, received for answer that his house was full — not 
a bed unoccupied. “But avast,” he added, tapping his forehead, “you 
haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer’s blanket, have ye ? I s’pose 
you are goin’ a-whalin’, so you’d better get used to that sort of thing.” 

I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed ; that if I should 
ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and 
that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the 
harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why, rather than wander 
further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with 
the half of any decent man’s blanket. 

“I thought so. All right ; take a seat. Sup^gr ? — you want supper ? 
Supper’ll be ready directly.” 

I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on 
the Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it 
with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at the 
space between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under full 
sail, but he didn’t make much headway, I thought. 

At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an 
adjoining room. It was cold as Iceland — no fire at all — the landlord 
said he couldn’t afford it. Nothing but tw T o dismal tallow candles, 
each in a winding-sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey- 
jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half-frozen 
fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial kind — not only meat 
and potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! 
One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to these 
dumplings in a most direful manner. 

“My boy,” said the landlord, “you’ll have the nightmare to a dead 
sartainty.” 

“Landlord,” I whispered, “that ain’t the harpooneer, is it?” 


12 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“Oh, no,” said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, “the har- 
pooneer is a dark-complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he 
don’t — he eats nothing but steaks, and likes ’em rare.” 

“The devil he does,” says I. “Where is that harpooneer? Is he 
here?” 

“He’ll be here afore long,” was the answer. 

I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this “dark- 
complexioned” harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that 
if it so turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and 
get into bed before I did. 

Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing 
not what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the 
evening as a looker-on. 

Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the land- 
lord cried, “That’s the Grampus's crew. I seed her reported in the 
offing this morning; a three years’ voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, 
boys; now we’ll have the latest news from the Feejees.” 

A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry ; the door was flung 
open, and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their 
shaggy watchcoats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, 
all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed 
an eruption of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their 
boat, and this was the first house they entered. Ho wonder, then, that 
they made a straight wake for the whale’s mouth — the bar — when the 
wrinkled little old Jonah, there officiating, soon poured them out 
brimmers all round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon 
which the old fellow mixed* him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, 
which he swore was a sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatso- 
ever, never mind of how long standing, or whether caught off the coast 
of Labrador, or on the weather side of an ice-island. 

The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even 
with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began caper- 
ing about most obstreperously. 

I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and 
though he seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by 
his own sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as 


THE WHITE WHALE « 

much noise as the rest. This man interested me at once; and since 
the sea-gods had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate 
(though but a sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is con- 
cerned), I will here venture upon a little description of him. He 
stood full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a 
coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face 
was deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the 
contrast; while in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminis- 
cences that did not seem to give him much joy. His voice at once 
announced that he was a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I 
thought he must be one of those tall mountaineers from the Alleghanian 
Ridge in Virginia. When the revelry of his companions had mounted 
to its height, this man slipped away unobserved, and I saw no more 
of him till he became my comrade on the sea. In a few minutes, 
however, he was missed by his shipmates, and being, it seems, for 
some reason a huge favourite with them, they raised a cry of “Bulk- 
ington ! Bulkington ! where’s Bulkington ?” and darted out of the house 
in pursuit of him. 

It was now about nine o’clock, and the room seeming almost super- 
naturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself upon 
a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to the entrance of 
the seamen. 

Ho man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good 
deal rather not sleep with your own brother. I don’t know how it is, 
but people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it 
comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a 
strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections 
indefinitely multiply. Nor was there any earthly reason why I as a 
sailor should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else ; for sailors no 
more sleep two in a bed at pea, than bachelor kings do ashore. To be 
sure they all sleep together in one apartment, but you have your own 
hammock, and cover yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in your 
own skin. 

The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated 
the thought of sleeping with him. It was getting late, and any decent 
harpooneer ought to be home and going bedwards. Suppose now, he 


14 


MOBY DICK; OR 

should tumble in upon me at midnight — how could I tell from what 
vile hole he had been coming? 

“Landlord ! I’ve changed my mind about that harpooneer. — I 
shan’t sleep with him. I’ll try the bench here.” 

“Just as you please; I’m sorry I can’t spare ye a tablecloth for a 
mattress, and it’s a plaguy rough board here” — feeling of the knots 
and notches. “But wait a bit, Skrimshander ; I’ve got a carpenter’s 
plane there in the bar — wait, I say, and I’ll make ye snug enough.” 
So saying he procured the plane; and with his old silk handkerchief 
first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed, the 
while grinning like an ape. The shavings flew right and left; till at 
last the plane-iron came hump against an indestructible knot. The 
landlord was near spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven’s sake 
to quit — the bed was soft enough to suit me, and I did not know how all 
the planing in the world could make eider down of a pine plank. So 
gathering up the shavings with another grin, and throwing them into the 
great stove in the middle of the room, he went about his business, and 
left me in a brown study. 

I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too 
short; but that could be mended with a chair. But it was a foot too 
narrow, and the other bench in the room was about four inches higher 
than the planed one — so there was no yoking them. I then placed the 
first bench lengthwise along the only clear space against the wall, leav- 
ing a little interval between, for my back to settle down in. But I soon 
found that there came such a draught of cold air over me from under 
the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at all, especially as 
another current from the rickety door met the one from the window, and 
both together formed a series of small whirlwinds in the immediate 
vicinity of the spot where I had thought to spend the night. 

“The devil fetch that harpooneer,” thought I, “but stop ! couldn’t I 
steal a march on him — bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed, not 
to be awakened by the most violent knockings?” It seemed no bad 
idea; but upon second thoughts I dismissed it. Bor who could tell but 
what the next morning, so soon as I popped out of the room, the har- 
pooneer might be standing in the entry, all ready to knock me down ! 

Still, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of spend- 
ing a sufferable night unless in some other person’s bed, I began to 


THE WHITE WHALE 


15 


think that, after all, I might he cherishing unwarrantable prejudices 
against this unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, “I’ll wait awhile; he 
must he dropping in before long. I’ll have a good look at him then, and 
perhaps we may become jolly good bedfellows after all — there’s no 
telling.” 

But though the other hoarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and 
threes, and going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer. 

“Landlord !” said I, “what sort of a chap is he — does he always keep 
such late hours ?” It was now hard upon twelve o’clock. 

The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be 
mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension. “Ho,” he 
answered, “generally he’s an early bird — airley to bed and airley to 
rise —yes, he’s the bird what catches the worm. — But tonight he went 
out a-peddling, you see, and I don’t see what on airth keeps him so late, 
unless, may be can’t sell his head.” 

“'Can’t sell his head ? — What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you 
are telling me ?” getting into a towering rage. “Do you pretend to say, 
landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday 
night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around this 
town ?” 

“That’s precisely it,” said the landlord, “and I told him he couldn’t 
sell it here, the market’s overstocked.” 

“With what ?” shouted I. 

“With heads, to he sure ; ain’t there too many heads in the world V 9 

“I tell you what it is, landlord,” said I quite calmly, “you’d better 
stop spinning that yarn to me — I’m not green.” 

“Maybe not,” taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, “but I 
rayther guess you’ll he done brown if that ere harpooneer hears you 
a-slanderin’ his head.” 

“I’ll break it for him,” said I, now hying into a passion again at 
this unaccountable farrago of the landlord’s. 

“It’s broke a’ready,” said he. 

“Broke,” said I — “broke, do you mean?” 

“Sartain, and that’s the very reason he can’t sell it, I guess.” 

“Landlord,” said I, going up to him as cool as Mount Hecla in a 
snowstorm, — “landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand 


16 


MOBY DICK; OR 

one another, and that too without delay. I come to your house and 
want a bed ; you tell me you can only give me half a one ; that the other 
half belongs to a certain harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, 
whom I have not yet seen, you persist in telling me the most mystifying 
and exasperating stories, tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feel- 
ing towards the man who you design for my bedfellow — a sort of con- 
nection, landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the 
highest degree. I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who 
and what this harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe 
to spend the night with him. And in the first place, you will be so 
good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if true I take 
10 be good evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I’ve no idea 
of sleeping with a madman ; and you, sir, you I mean, landlord, you, 
sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would thereby render 
yourself liable to a criminal prosecution.” 

“Wall,” said the landlord, fetching a long breath, “that’s a purty 
long sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then. But be easy, 
be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin’ you of has just arrived 
from the South Seas, where he brought up a lot of ’balmed Hew Zealand 
heads (great curios, you know), and he’s sold all on ’em but one, and 
that one he’s trying to sell to-night, ’cause to-morrow’s Sunday, and it 
would not do to be sellin’ human heads about the streets when folks is 
goin’ to churches. He wanted to, last Sunday, but I stopped him just 
as he was goin’ out of the door with four heads strung on a string, for 
all the airth like a string of inions.” 

This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and 
showed that the landlord, after all, had no idea of fooling me — but at 
the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out of 
a Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a can- 
nibal business as selling the heads of dead idolaters ? 

“Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man.” 

“He pays reg’lar,” was the rejoinder. “But come, it’s getting dread- 
ful late, you had better be turning flukes — it’s a nice bed ; Sal and me 
slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced. There’s plenty room 
for two to kick about in that bed ; it’s an almighty big bed that. Why, 
afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and little Johnny in the 


©OK1692S1 


















i 






























17 


THE WHITE WHALE 

loot of it. But I got a-dreaming and sprawling about one night, and 
somehow Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near breaking his 
arm. Arter that, Sal said it wouldn’t do. Come along here, I’ll give 
ye a glim in a jiffy”; and so saying he lighted a candle and held it 
towards me, offering to lead the way. But I stood irresolute; when 
looking at a clock in the corner, he exclaimed “I vum it’s Sunday — 
you won’t see that harpooneer to-night ; he’s come to anchor somewhere 
— come along then; do come; won't ye come?” 

I considered the matter a moment, and then upstairs we went, and 
I was ushered into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure 
enough, with a prodigious bed, almost big enough indeed for any four 
harpooneers to sleep abreast. 

“There,” said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea- 
chest that did double duty as a washstand and centre-table; “there, 
make yourself comfortable now, and good-night to ye.” I turned 
round from eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared. 

Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none 
of the most elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then 
glanced round the room; and besides the bedstead and centre table, 
could see no other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude shelf, 
the four walls, and a papered fireboard representing a man striking a 
whale. Of things not properly belonging to the room, there was a 
hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in one comer; also a 
large seaman’s bag, containing the harpooneer’s wardrobe, no doubt 
in lieu of a land trunk. Likewise, there was a parcel of outlandish 
bone fish-hooks on the shelf over the fireplace, and a tall harpoon 
standing at the head of the bed. 

But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to 
the light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to 
arrive at some satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can compare 
it to nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with 
little tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills round 
an Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in the middle of this 
mat, the same as in South American ponchos. But could it be pos- 
sible that any sober harpooneer would get into a door mat, and parade 
the streets of any Christian town in that sort of guise? I put it on, 
to try it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly 


18 


MOBY DICK; OR 

shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this myste- 
rious harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in 
it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a 
sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave 
myself a kink in the neck. 

I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about 
this head-peddling harpooneer, -and his door mat. After thinking 
some time on the bedside, I got up and took off my monkey-jacket, 
and then stood in the middle of the room thinking. I then took off 
my coat, and thought a little more in my shirt-sleeves. But beginning 
to feel very cold now, half undressed as I was, and remembering what 
the landlord said about the harpooneer’s not coming home at all that 
night, it being so very late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of 
my pantaloons and boots, and then blowing out the light tumbled 
into bed, and commended myself to the care of heaven. 

Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crock- 
ery, there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not 
sleep for a long -time. At last I slid off into a light doze, and had 
pretty nearly made a good thing offing towards the land of Nod, when I 
heard a heavy footfall in the passage, and saw a glimmer of light 
come into the room from under the door. 

“Lord save me,” thinks I, “that must be the harpooneer, the infernal 
head-pedlar.” But I lay perfectly still, and resolved not to say a 
word till spoken to. Holding a light in one hand, and that identical 
New Zealand head in the other, the stranger entered the room, and 
without looking towards the bed, placed his candle a good way off 
from me on the floor in one corner, and then began working away 
at the knotted cords of the large bag I before spoke of as being in 
the room. I was all eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted 
for some time while employed in unlacing the bag’s mouth. This 
accomplished, however, he turned round — when, good heavens! what 
a sight ! Such a face ! It was of a dark, purplish, yellow colour, here 
and there stuck over with large, blackish looking squares. Yes, it’s 
just as I thought, he’s a terrible bedfellow; he’s been in a fight, got 
dreadfully cut, and here he is, just from the surgeon. But at that 
moment he chanced to turn his face so towards the light, that I plainly 
saw they could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on 


19 


THE WHITE WHALE 

his cheeks. They were stains of some sort or other. At first I knew 
not what to make of this ; hut soon an inkling of the truth occurred 
to me. I remembered a story of a white man — a whaleman too — who, 
falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them. I concluded 
that this harpooneer, in the course of his distant voyages, must have 
met with a similar adventure. And what is it, thought I, after all! 
It’s only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin. But 
then, what to make of his unearthly complexion, that part of it, I 
mean, lying round about, and completely independent of the squares 
of tattooing. To be sure, it might be nothing but a good coat of 
tropical tanning; but I never heard of a hot sun’s tanning a white 
man into a purplish yellow one. However, I had never been in 
the South Seas; and perhaps the sun there produced these extraor- 
dinary effects upon the skin. How, while all these ideas were passing 
through me like lightning, this harpooneer never noticed me at all. 
But, after some difficulty having opened his bag, he commenced fum- 
bling in it, and presently pulled out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal- 
skin wallet with the hair on. Placing these on the old chest in the 
middle of the room, he then took the Hew Zealand head — a ghastly 
thing enough — and crammed it down into the bag. He now took off 
his hat — a new beaver hat — when I came nigh singing out with fresh 
surprise. There was no hair on his head — none to speak of at least — 
nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald 
purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. 
Had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would have 
bolted out of it quicker than ever I bolted a dinner. 

Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, 
but it was the second floor back. I am no coward, but what to make 
of this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my comprehen- 
sion. Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely non- 
plussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as 
much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus 
broken into my room at the dead of night. In fact, I was so afraid 
of him that I was not game enough just then to address him, and 
demand a satisfactory answer concerning what seemed inexplicable in 
him. 

Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last 


20 


MOBY DICK; OR 

showed his chest and 'arms. As I live, these covered parts of him 
were checkered with the same squares as his face; his back, too, was 
all over the same dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty 
Years’ War, and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. 
Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green 
frogs were running up the trunks of young palms. It was now quite 
plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard 
of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian 
country. I quaked to think of it. A pedlar of heads too — perhaps 
the heads of his own brothers. He might take a fancy to mine — 
heavens ! look at that tomahawk ! 

But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went 
about something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced 
me that he must indeed be a heathen. Going to his heavy grego, or 
wrapall, or dreadnought, which he had previously hung on a chair, he 
fumbled in the pockets, and produced at length a curious little de- 
formed image with a hunch on its back, and exactly the colour of a 
three days’ old Congo baby. Remembering the embalmed head, at 
first I almost thought that this black manikin was a real baby pre- 
served in some similar manner. But seeing that it was not at all 
limber, and that it glistened a good deal like polished ebony, I con- 
cluded that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed it 
proved to be. For now the savage goes up to the empty fireplace, and 
removing the papered fireboard, sets up this little hunchbacked image, 
like a tenpin, between the andirons. The chimney jambs and all the 
bricks inside were very sooty, so that I thought this fireplace made a 
very appropriate little shrine or chapel for his Congo idol. 

I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half-hidden image, feeling 
but ill at ease meantime — to see what was next to follow. First he 
takes about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and 
places them carefully before the idol ; then laying a bit of ship biscuit 
on top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the shavings 
into a sacrificial blaze. Presently, after many hasty snatches into the 
fire, and still hastier withdrawals of his fingers (whereby he seemed to 
be scorching them badly), he at last succeeded in drawing out the 
biscuit; then blowing off the heat and ashes a little, he made a polite 


THE WHITE WHALE 


21 


offer of it to the little negro. But the little devil did not seem to 
fancy such dry sort of fare at all ; he never moved his lips. All these 
strange antics were accompanied by still stranger guttural noises from 
the devotee, who seemed to he praying in a sing-song or else singing 
some pagan psalmody or other, during which his face twitched about 
in the most unnatural manner. At last extinguishing the fire, he took 
the idol up very unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego 
pocket as carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead wood- 
cock. 

All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and 
seeing him now exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business 
operations, and jumping into bed with me, I thought it was high time, 
now or never, before the light was put out, to break the spell in which 
I had so long been bound. 

But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal one. 
Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he’ examined the head of it 
for an instant, and then holding it to* the light, with his mouth at the 
handle, he puffed out great clouds of tobacco* smoke. The next mo- 
ment the light was extinguished, and this wild cannibal, tomahawk 
between his teeth, sprang into bed with me. I sang out, I could not 
help it now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment he began 
feeling me. 

Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from 
him against the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he 
might be, to keep quiet, and let me get up and light the lamp again. 
But his guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but ill com- 
prehended my meaning. 

“Who-e debel you ?” — he at last said — “You no speak-e, dam-me, I 
kill-e.” And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about 
me in the dark. 

“Landlord, for God's sake, Peter Coffin!" shouted I. “Landlord! 
Watch ! Coffin ! Angels ! Save me !” 

“Speake-e ! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e !” again growled 
the cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered 
the hot tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on 
fire. But thank heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the 


22 


MOBY DICK; OR 

room light in hand, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him. 

“Don’t be afraid now,” said he, grinning again. “Queequeg here 
wouldn’t harm a hair of jour head.” 

“Stop jour grinning,” shouted I, “and whj didn’t jou tell me that 
infernal harpooneer was a cannibal ?” 

“I thought je know’d it ; — didn’t I tell je, he was a peddlin’ heads 
around town ? — But turn flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look 
here — jou sabbee me, I sabbee jou — this man sleepe jou — jou sab- 
bee ?” 

“Me sabbee plenty” — granted Queequeg, puffing awaj at his pipe 
and sitting up in bed. 

“You gettee in,” he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and 
throwing the clothes to one side. He reallj did this in not onlj a civil 
but a reallj kind and charitable waj. I stood looking at him a mo- 
ment. For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, cornel j look- 
ing cannibal. “What’s all this fuss I have been making about,” 
thought I to mjself — “the man’s a human being just as I am: he has 
just as much reason to fear me as I have to be afraid of him. Better 
sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” 

“Landlord,” said I, “tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, 
or whatever jou call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I will 
turn in with him. But I don’t fancj having a man smoking in bed 
with me. It’s dangerous. Besides, I ain’t insured.” 

This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politelj 
motioned me to get into bed — rolling over to one side as much as to 
saj — “I won’t touch a leg of je.” 

“Good-night, landlord,” said I ; “jou maj go.” 

I turned in, and never slept better in mj life. 

CHAPTER IY 

THE COUNTERPANE 

Upon waking next morning about dajlight, I found Queequeg’s arm 
thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You 
had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of 
patchwork, full of odd little parti-coloured squares and triangles; and 


23 


THE WHITE WHALE 

this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth 
of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade — owing 
I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and 
shade, his shirt-sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times — this 
same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that 
same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did 
when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so 
blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense of weight 
and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me. 

My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When 
I was a child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that 
befell me; whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely 
settle. The circumstance was this. I had been cutting up some caper 
or other — I think is was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had 
seen a little sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, 
somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to 
bed supperless, — my stepmother dragged me by the legs out of the 
chimney and packed me off to bed, though it was only two o’clock in 
the afternoon of the 21st June, the longest day in the year in our hemi- 
sphere. I felt dreadfully. But there was no help for it, so upstairs 
I went to my little room in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly 
as possible so as to kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the 
sheets. 

I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must 
elapse before I could hope to get out of bed again. Sixteen hours 
in bed! the small of my back ached to think of it. And it was so 
light too; the sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of 
coaches in the streets, and the sound of gay voices all over the house. 
I felt worse and worse — at last I got up, dressed, and softly going 
down in my stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly 
threw myself at her feet, beseeching her as a particular favour to 
give me a good slippering for my misbehaviour; anything indeed but 
condemning me to lie abed such an unendurable length of time. But 
she was the best and most conscientious of stepmothers, and back I 
had to go to my room. Bor several hours I lay there broad awake, 
feeling a great deal worse than I have ever done since, even from the 
greatest subsequent misfortunes. At last I must have fallen into a 


24 


MOBY DICK; OR 

troubled nightmare of a doze ; and slowly waking from it — half steeped 
in dreams — I opened my eyes, and the before sunlit room was now 
wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running through 
all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; 
but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over 
the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phan- 
tom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bedside. 
For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most 
awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand ; yet ever thinking that 
if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be broken. 
I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me; but 
waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for 
days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding 
attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often 
puzzle myself with it. 

Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the 
supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to 
those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg’ s pagan 
arm thrown round me. But at length all the past night’s events 
soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive 
to the comical predicament. For though I tried to move his arm — 
unlock his clasp — yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly, 
as though naught but death should part us twain. I now strove to 
rouse him — “Queequeg!” — but his only answer was a snore. I then 
rolled over, my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and sud- 
denly felt a slight scratch. Throwing aside the counterpane, there 
lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage’s side, as if it were a hatchet- 
faced baby. A pretty pickle, truly, thought I ; abed here in a strange 
house in the broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk! “Quee- 
queg! — in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!” At length, by 
dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations upon 
the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that sort of style, 
I succeeded in extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his 
arm, shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the 
water, and sat up in bed, stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rub- 
bing his eyes as if he did not altogether remember how I came to be 
there, though a dim consciousness of knowing something about mo 


25 


THE WHITE WHALE 

seemed slowly dawning over him. Meanwhile, I lay quietly eyeing 
him, having no serious misgivings now, and bent upon narrowly ob- 
serving so curious a creature. When, at last, his mind seemed made 
up touching the character of his bedfellow, and he became, as it were, 
reconciled to the fact; he jumped out upon the floor, and by certain 
signs and sounds gave me to understand that, if it pleased me he would 
dress flrst and then leave me to dress afterwards, leaving the whole 
apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg, under the circumstances, 
this is a very civilised overture ; but, the truth is, these savages have 
an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvellous how 
essentially polite they are. I pay this particular compliment to Quee- 
queg, because he treated me with so much civility and consideration, 
while I was guilty of great rudeness; staring at him from the bed, 
and watching all his toilet motions: for the time my curiosity getting 
the better of my breeding. Nevertheless, a man like Queequeg you 
don’t see every day, he and his ways were well worth unusual re- 
garding. 

He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very 
tall one, by the bye, and then — still minus his trousers, — he hunted 
up his boots. What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, 
but his next movement was to crush himself — boots in hand, and hat 
on — under the bed ; when, from sundry violent gaspings and strainings, 
I inferred he was hard at work booting himself ; though by no law of 
propriety that I ever heard of, is any man required to be private when 
putting on his boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in 
the transition state — neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just 
enough civilized to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible 
manner. His education was not yet completed. He was an under- 
graduate. If he had not been a small degree civilised, he very prob- 
ably would not have troubled himself with boots at all; but then, if 
he had not been still a savage, he never would have dreamt of getting 
under the bed to put them on. At last, he emerged with his hat very 
much dented and crushed down over his eyes and began creaking and 
limping about the room, as if, not being much accustomed to boots, 
his pair of damp, wrinkled cowhide ones — probably not made to order 
either — rather pinched and tormented him at the first go off of a 
bitter cold morning. 


26 


MOBY DICK; OR 

Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that 
the street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain 
view into the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure 
that Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots 
on ; I begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet somewhat, 
and particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as possible. He 
complied, .and then proceeded to wash himself. At that time in the 
morning any Christian would have washed his face ; but Queequeg, to 
my amazement, contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his 
chest, arms, and hands. He then donned his waistcoat, and taking up 
a piece of hard soap on the washstand centre table, dipped it into water 
and commenced lathering his face. I was watching to see where he 
kept his razor, when lo and behold, he takes the harpoon from the bed 
corner, slips out the long wooden stock, unsheathes the head, whets it 
a little on his boot, and striding up to the bit of mirror against the 
wall, begins a vigorous scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks. 
Thinks I, Queequeg, this is using Roger’s best cutlery with a venge- 
ance. Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation when I came 
to know of what fine steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how 
exceedingly sharp the long straight edges are always kept. 

The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched 
out of the room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey-jacket, and 
sporting his harpoon like a marshal’s baton. 


CHAPTER V 

BREAKFAST 

I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted 
the grinning landlord very pleasantly. I cherished no malice towards 
him, though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the matter 
of my bedfellow. 

However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce 
a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own 
proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be 
backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and he spent 
in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable 


THE WHITE WHALE 27 

about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think 
for. 

The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping 
in the night previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at. 
They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and 
third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, 
and harpooneers, and ship keepers ; a brown and brawny company, with 
bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey-jackets for 
morning-gowns. 

You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. 
This young fellow’s healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, 
and would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three 
days landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few 
shades lighter ; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the 
complexion of a third still lingers a tropic town, but slightly bleached 
withal ; he doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could 
show a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed 
like the Andes’ western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting 
climates, zone by zone. 

“Grub, ho !” now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we 
went to breakfast. 

They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite 
at ease in manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, 
though: Ledyard, the great Yew England traveller, and Mungo Park, 
the Scotch one; of all men, they possessed the least assurance in the 
parlour. But perhaps the mere crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn 
by dogs as Ledyard did, or the taking a long solitary walk on an empty 
stomach, in the negro heart of Africa, which was the sum of poor 
Mungo’s performances — this kind of travel, I say, may not be the very 
best mode of attaining a high social polish. Still, for the most part, 
that sort of thing is to be had anywhere. 

These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that 
after we were all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear some 
good stories about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly every man 
maintained a profound silence. And not only that, but they looked 
embarrassed. Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without 
the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas — 


28 


MOBY DICK; OR 

entire strangers to them — and duelled them dead without winking ; and 
yet, here they sat at a social breakfast-table — all of the same calling, 
all of kindred tastes — looking round as sheepishly at each other as 
though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the 
Green Mountains. A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid 
warrior whalemen! 

But as for Queequeg — why, Queequeg sat there among them — at the 
head of the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure 
I cannot say much for his breeding. His greatest admirer could not 
have cordially justified his bringing his harpoon in to breakfast with 
him, and using it there without ceremony; reaching over the table 
with it, to the imminent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the 
beefsteaks towards him. But that was certainly very coolly done by 
him, and every one knows that in most people’s estimation, to do any- 
thing coolly is to do it genteelly. 

We will not speak ^ of all Queequeg’ s peculiarities here; how he 
eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to 
beefsteaks, done rare. Enough, that when breakfast was over he with- 
drew like the rest into the public room, lighted his tomahawk-pipe, 
and was sitting there quietly digesting and smoking with his insepara- 
ble hat on, when I sallied out for a stroll. 


CHAPTER VI 

THE STREET 

If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish 
an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a 
civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first 
daylight stroll through the streets of Hew Bedford. 

In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will fre- 
quently offer to view the queerest-looking nondescripts from foreign 
parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut Streets, Mediterranean mari- 
ners will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not 
unknown to Lascars and Malays ; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, 
live Yankees have often scared the natives. But Hew Bedford beats 


29 


THE WHITE WHALE 

all Water Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you 
see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting 
at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their 
bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare. 

But, besides the Feejeeans, Tongatabooars, Erromangoans, Pannan- 
gians, and Brighgians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling- 
craft which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights 
still more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this 
town scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst 
for gain and glory in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart 
frames; fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe 
and snatch the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Moun- 
tains whence they came. In some things you would think them hut a 
few hours old. Look there ! that chap strutting round the comer. He 
wears a heaver hat and swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt 
and sheath-knife. Here comes another with a sou’-wester and a bom- 
bazine cloak. 

No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one — I mean 
a downright bumpkin dandy — a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow 
his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now 
when a country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a dis- 
tinguished reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you should 
see the comical things he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeak- 
ing his sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats ; straps to his 
canvas trousers. Ah poor Hay-seed! how bitterly will hurst those 
straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, 
and all, down the throat of the tempest. 

But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, 
and bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford 
is a queer place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land 
would this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast 
of Labrador. As it is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten 
one, they look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest place 
to live in, in all New England. It is a land of oil, true enough: but 
not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not 
run with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh 
eggs. Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more 


30 


MOBY DICK; OR 

patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent than in Yew 
Bedford. Whence came they? how planted upon this once scraggy 
scoria of a country? 

Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder 
lofty mansion, and your question will he answered. Yes; all these 
brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and 
Indian Oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up 
hither from the bottom of the sea. 

In Yew Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their 
daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises apiece. 
You must go to Yew Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say, 
they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly 
burn their lengths in spermaceti candles. 

In summer time, the town is sweet to see ; full of fine maples — long 
avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful 
and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelahra-wise, proffer the passer-by 
their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent 
is art; which in many a district of Yew Bedford has superinduced 
bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks. 

And the women of Yew Bedford, they bloom like their own red 
roses. But roses only bloom in summer ; whereas the fine carnation of 
their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere 
match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me 
the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them 
miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas 
instead of the Puritanic sands. 


CHAPTER VII 

THE CHAPEL 

In this same Yew Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel, and 
few are the moody fishermen, shortly hound for the Indian Ocean or 
Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I 
did not. 

Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this 
special errand. The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driv- 


THE WHITE WHALE 


31 


ing sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth 
called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm. Enter- 
ing, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors’ wives 
and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the 
shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting 
apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and in- 
communicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these 
silent island's of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble 
tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the 
pulpit. Three of them ran something like the following, but I do not 
pretend to quote: — 


SACRED 

To the Memory 
of 

JOHN TALBOT, 

Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard. 
Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, 
November 1st, 1836. 

THIS TABLET 

Is erected to his Memory 

BY HIS SISTER. 


SACRED 

To the Memory 
of 

ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY, 

NATHAN COLEMAN, WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY, 
AND SAMUEL GLEIG, 

Forming one of the boats’ crews 

OF 

THE SHIP ELIZA, 

Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, 

On the Off-shore Ground in the 

PACIFIC, 

December 31st, 1839. 

THIS MARBLE 

Is here placed by their surviving 

SHIPMATES. 


32 


MOBY DICK; OR 


SACRED 

To the Memory 
of 

The late 

CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, 

Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a 
Sperm Whale on the coast of J apan, 

August 3 d, 1833. 

THIS TABLET 

Is erected to his Memory 

BY 

HIS WIDOW. 

Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated my- 
self near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg 
near me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wonder- 
ing gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This savage was 
the only person present who seemed to notice my entrance ; because he 
was the only one who could not read, and, therefore, was not reading 
those frigid inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of the relatives of 
the seamen whose names appeared there were now among the congrega- 
tion, I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the 
fishery, and so plainly did several women present wear the countenance 
if not the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here 
before me were assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of 
those bleak tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed 
afresh. 

Oh ! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass ; who standing 
among flowers can say — here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the 
desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in 
those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes ! What despair in 
those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infi- 
delities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all F aith, and refuse resur- 
rections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. 
As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here. 

In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included ; 
why is it that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales, 


THE WHITE WHALE 


33 


though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands ; how it is that 
to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix so 
significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he 
but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth ; why the Life 
Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what 
eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies an- 
tique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago ; how it is that we still 
refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwell- 
ing in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the 
dead ; wherefore but the rumour of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a 
whole city. All these things are not without their meanings. 

But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these 
dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope. 

It needs scarcely to he told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nan- 
tucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light 
of that darkened doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had 
gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may he thine. But 
somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine 
chance for promotion, it seems — aye, a stove boat will make me an im- 
mortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a 
speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what 
then ? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and 
Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my 
true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are 
too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking 
that thick water the thinnest of air. 

Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take 
my body who will, take it I say, it is not myself. And therefore three 
cheers for Nantucket, and come a stove boat and stove body when they 
will, for stave my soul, who can do this ? 

CHAPTER VIII 

THE PUEPIT 

I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable ro- 
bustness entered j immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon 


34 


MOBY DICK; OR 

admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all the congregation, 
sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the chaplain. Yes, it 
was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen among whom 
he was a very great favourite. He had been a sailor and a harpooneer 
in his youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life to the minis- 
try. At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy 
winter of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging 
into a second flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, 
there shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom — the 
spring verdure peeping forth even beneath February’s snow. N o one 
having previously heard his history, could for the first time behold 
Father Mapple without the utmost interest, because there were certain 
engrafted clerical peculiarities about him, imputable to that adventur- 
ous maritime life he had led. When he entered I observed that he 
carried no umbrella, and certainly had not come in his carriage, for his 
tarpaulin hat ran down with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth 
jacket seemed almost to drag him to the floor with the weight of the 
water it had absorbed. However, hat and coat and overshoes were one 
by one removed, and hung up in a little space in an adjacent corner: 
when, arrayed in a decent suit, he quietly approached the pulpit. 

Like most old-fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a 
regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the floor, 
seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the architect, it 
seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the 
pulpit without stairs, substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like 
those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea. The wife of a whal- 
ing captain had provided the chapel with a handsome pair of red wor- 
sted man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself nicely headed, and 
stained with a mahogany colour, the whole contrivance, considering 
what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in bad taste. Halt- 
ing for an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both hands grasp- 
ing the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look 
upwards, and then with a truly sailorlike but still reverential dexterity, 
hand over hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the maintop of his 
vessel. 

The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case 
with swinging ones, were of cloth covered rope, only the rounds were 


THE WHITE WHALE 35 

of wood, so that at every step there was a joint. At my first glimpse 
of the pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient for a ship, 
these joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary. For I was 
not prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly 
turn round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the 
ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him 
impregnable in his little Quebec. 

I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for 
this. Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and 
sanctity, that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any 
mere tricks of the stage. No, thought I, there must be some sober 
reason for this thing; furthermore, it must symbolise something un- 
seen. Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies 
his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties 
and connections? Yes, for replenished with the meat and wine of 
the world, to the faithful man of God, this pulpit, I see, is a self- 
containing stronghold — a lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well 
of water within the walls. 

But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place, 
borrowed from the chaplain’s former seafarings. Between the marble 
cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which formed its back 
was adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship beating 
against a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy 
breakers. But high above the flying scud and dark-rolling clouds, there 
floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an angel’s 
face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of radiance upon the 
ship’s tossed deck, something like that silver plate now inserted into 
the Victory's plank where Nelson fell. “Ah, noble ship,” the angel 
seemed to say, “beat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and bear a hardy 
helm, for lo ! the sun is breaking through ; the clouds are rolling off — 
serenest azure is at hand.” 

Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea taste that 
had achieved the ladder and the picture. Its panelled front was in 
the likeness of a ship’s bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a pro- 
jecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship’s fiddle-headed 
beak. 

What could be more full of meaning? — for the pulpit is ever this 


36 


MOBY DICK; OR 

earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads 
the world. From thence it is that the storm of God’s quick wrath 
is first descried, and the how must bear the earliest brunt. From 
thence it is that the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for 
favourable winds. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not 
a voyage complete ; and the pulpit is its prow. 


CHAPTER IX 

THE SERMON 

Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority 
ordered the scattered people to condense. “ Starboard gangway, there I 
side away to larboard — larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! 
midships !” 

There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, 
and a still slighter shuffling of women’s shoes, and all was quiet again, 
and every eye on the preacher. 

He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit’s bows, folded his 
large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered 
a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the 
bottom of the sea. 

This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of 
a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog — in such tones he 
commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner to- 
wards the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation 
and joy— 

“The ribs and terrors in the whale, 

Arched over me a dismal gloom, 

While all God’s sunlit waves rolled by, 

And lift me deepening down to doom. 

“I saw the opening maw of hell, 

With endless pains and sorrows there; 

Which none but they that feel can tell — 

Oh, I was plunging to despair. 


THE WHITE WHALE 37 

“In black distress, I called my God, 

When I could scarce believe Him mine, 

He bowed His ear to my complaints — 

Ho more the whale did me confine. 

“With speed He flew to my relief, 

As on a radiant dolphin bore; 

Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone 
The face of my Deliverer God. 

“My songs for ever shall record 
That terrible, that joyful hour; 

I give the glory to my God, 

His all the mercy and the power.” 

Hearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above 
the howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly 
turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down 
upon the proper page, said: “Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse 
of the first chapter of Jonali — ‘And God had prepared a great fish to 
swallow up Jonah.’ 

“Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters — four yarns — 
is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. 
Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah’s deep sea line sound! what 
a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet ! What a noble thing is that 
canticle in the fish’s belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! 
We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy 
bottom of the waters; seaweed and all the slime of the sea is about 
us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches! Ship- 
mates, it is a two-stranded lesson ; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and 
a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson 
to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly 
awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally 
the deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the 
sin of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command 
of God — never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed — 
which he found a hard command. But all the things that God would 
have us do are hard for us to do — remember that — and hence, He 
oftener commands us than endeavours to persuade. And if we obey 


38 


MOBY DICK; OR 

God, we must disobey ourselves ; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, 
wherein the hardness of obeying God consists. 

“With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts 
at God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by 
men will carry him into countries where God does not reign, but only 
the Captains of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, 
seeks a ship that’s bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto 
unheeded meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been 
no other city than the modern Cadiz. That’s the opinion of learned 
men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates ? Cadiz is in Spain ; as far by 
water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient 
days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, 
the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the Medi- 
terranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand 
miles to the westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. 
See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee world-wide from 
God ! Miserable man ! Oh ! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn ; 
with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling 
among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So 
disordered, self-condemning is his look; that had there been policemen 
in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had 
been arrested ere he touched a dock. How plainly he’s a fugitive! 
Ho baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag — no friends accompany 
him to the wharf with their adieux. At last, after much dodging 
search, he finds the Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo ; 
and as he steps on board to see its captain in the cabin, all the sailors for 
the moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger’s evil 
eye. Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and confi- 
dence; in vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the 
man assure the mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome 
but still serious way, one whispers to the other — Mack, he’s robbed a 
widow’; or, ‘Joe, do you mark him; he’s a bigamist’; or, ‘Harry lad, 
I guess he’s the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike, 
one of the missing murderers from Sodom.’ Another runs to read the 
bill that’s stuck against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship is 
moored, offering five hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a 
parricide, and containing a description of his person. He reads, and 


THE WHITE WHALE 39 

looks from J onah to the bill ; while all his sympathetic shipmates now 
crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay their hands upon him. Frighted 
Jonah trembles, and summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks 
so much the more a coward. He will not confess himself suspected ; 
but that itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the best of it ; and when 
the sailors find him not to he the man that is advertised, they let him 
pass, and he descends into the cabin. 

u ‘Who’s there ?’ cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making 
out his papers for the Customs — ‘Who’s there ?’ Oh ! how that harm- 
less question mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee 
again. But he rallies. ‘I seek a passage in the ship to Tarshish; 
how soon sail ye, sir?’ Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up 
to J onah, though the man now stands before him ; hut no sooner does he 
hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinising glance. ‘We sail 
with the next coming tide,’ at last he slowly answered, still intently eye- 
ing him. ‘Ho sooner, sir?’ — ‘Soon enough for any honest man that 
goes a passenger.’ Ha! Jonah! that’s another stab. But he swiftly 
calls away the Captain from that scent. ‘I’ll sail with ye,’ — he says, 
— ‘the passage money, how much is that? — I’ll pay now.’ For it is 
particularly written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be over- 
looked in this history, ‘that he paid the fare thereof’ ere the craft did 
sail. And taken with the context, this is full of meaning. 

“How Jonah’s Captain, shipmates, was. one whose discernment detects 
crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In 
this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and with- 
out a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. 
So Jonah’s Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah’s purse, ere 
he judge him openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it’s 
assented to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive ; but at 
the same time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold. 
Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still 
molest the Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Hot 
a forger, any way, he mutters ; and Jonah is put down for his passage. 
‘Point out my state-room, sir,’ says Jonah now, ‘I’m travel-weary; 
I need sleep.’ ‘Thou look’st like it,’ says the Captain, ‘there’s thy 
room.’ Jonah enters, and would lock the door, but the lock contains 
no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling there, the Captain laughs 


40 


MOBY DICK; OR 

lowly to himself, and mutters something about the doors of convicts’ 
cells being never allowed to be locked within. All dressed and dusty 
as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth, and finds the little state- 
room ceiling almost resting on his forehead. The air is close, and 
Jonah gasps. Then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the 
ship’s water-line, Jonah finds the heralding presentiment of that sti- 
fling hour, when the whale shall hold him in the smallest of his bowels’ 
wards. 

“Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly os- 
cillates in Jonah’s room ; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf 
with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, 
though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with 
reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it 
but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The 
lamp alarms and frightens Jonah ; as lying in his berth his tormented 
eyes roll around the place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds 
no refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp 
more and more appalls him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are 
all awry. ‘Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!’ he groans, ‘straight 
upward, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crooked- 
ness !’ 

“Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still 
reeling, but with- conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of 
the Roman racehorse but so much the more strike his steel tags into 
him ; as one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in giddy 
anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed; and 
at last amid the whirl of woe he feels a deep stupor steal over him, 
as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and 
there’s naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in his berth, 
Jonah’s prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to 
sleep. 

“And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; 
and from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all 
careening, glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was the first of 
recorded smugglers! the contraband was Jonah. But the sea rebels; 
he will not bear the wicked burden. A dreadful storm comes on, the 
ship is like to break. But now when tKe boatswain calls all hands to 


THE WHITE WHALE 


41 


lighten her; when boxes, bales, and jars are tumbling overboard; when 
the wind is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank 
thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah’s head; in all this raging 
tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky and 
raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he 
the far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is 
cleaving the seas -after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down 
into the sides of the ship — a berth in the cabin as I have taken it, 
and was fast asleep. But the frightened master comes to him, and 
shrieks in his dead ear, ‘What meanest thou, O sleeper! arise!’ 
Startled from his lethargy by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his 
feet, and stumbling to the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon the 
sea. But at that moment he is sprung upon by a panther billow leap- 
ing over the bulwarks. Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship, and 
finding no speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft, till the mariners 
come nigh to drowning while yet afloat. And ever, as the white moon 
shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the blackness over- 
head, aghast Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, 
but soon beat downward again towards the tormented deep. 

“Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his 
cringing attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The 
sailors mark him; more and more certain grow their suspicions of 
him, and at last, fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter 
to high Heaven, they fall to casting lots, to see for whose cause this 
great tempest was upon them. The lot is Jonah’s; that discovered, 
then how furiously they mob him with their questions. ‘What is thine 
occupation? Whence comest thou? Thy country? What people?’ 
But mark now, my shipmates, the behaviour of poor J onah. The eager 
mariners but ask him who he is, and where from; whereas, they not 
only receive an answer to those questions, but likewise another answer 
to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited answer is forced from 
Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him. 

“ ‘I am a Hebrew,’ he cries — and then — ‘I fear the Lord the God 
of Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land!’ Fear him, O 
Jonah? Aye, well mightest thou fear the Lord God then! Straight- 
way, he now goes on to make a full confession; whereupon the mari- 
ners became more and more appalled, but still are pitiful. For when 


42 


MOBY DICK; OR 

J onah, not yet supplicating God for mercy, since he but too well knew 
the darkness of his deserts, — when wretched Jonah cries out to them 
to take him and cast him forth into the sea, for he knew that for his sake 
this great tempest was upon them ; they mercifully turn from him, and 
seek by other means to save the ship. But all in vain; the indignant 
gale howls louder; then, with one hand raised invokingly to God, with 
the other they not unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah. 

“And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the 
sea ; when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the 
sea is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth 
water behind. He goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterful 
commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething 
into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his 
ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah 
prayed unto the Lord out of the fish’s belly. But observe his prayer, 
and learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep 
and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punish- 
ment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself 
with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look to- 
wards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful 
repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. 
And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the 
eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I 
do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sins, hut I do 
place him before you as a model for repentance. Sin not ; but if you 
do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah.” 

While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking, 
slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who, 
when describing Jonah’s sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself. 
His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell ; his tossed arms seemed 
the warring elements at work ; and the thunders that rolled away from 
off his swarthy brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all his 
simple hearers look on him with a quick fear that was strange to them. 

There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the 
leaves of the Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless, with 
closed eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with his God. 

But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head 


THE WHITE WHALE 43 

lowly, with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake 
these words: 

“Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you ; both his hands 
press upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may he mine the 
lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still 
more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly 
would I come down from this masthead and sit on the hatches there 
where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads me 
that other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to me, as a pilot 
of the living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of 
true things, and hidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths 
in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he 
should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and 
his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish 
he never reached. As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, 
and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantr 
ings tore him along ‘into the midst of the seas/ where the eddying depths 
sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and ‘the weeds were wrapped 
about his head/ and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. Y$t 
even then beyond the reach of any plummet — ‘out of the belly of hell’ 
— when the whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmost hones, even then, 
God heard the engulfed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God 
spake unto the fish ; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the 
sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, 
and all the delights of air and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon 
the dry land’ ; when the word of the Lord came a second time ; and 
Jonah, bruised and beaten — his ears, like two sea-shells, still multi- 
tudinously murmuring of the ocean — Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. 
And what was that, shipmates ? To preach the truth to the face of 
Falsehood! That was it! 

“This, shipmates, this is that other lesson ; and woe to that pilot of 
the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms 
from Gospel duty ! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters 
when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to 
please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more 
to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not 
dishonour! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be 


44 


MOBY DICK; OR 

false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul 
has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway !” 

He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment ; then lifting 
his face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out 
with a heavenly enthusiasm, — “But oh ! shipmates ! on the starboard 
hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that 
delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the maintruck 
higher than the keelson is low ? Delight is to him — a far, far upward, 
and inward delight — who against the proud gods and commodores of 
this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him 
whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treach- 
erous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives 
no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though 
he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight, 
— top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but 
the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, 
whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can 
never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight 
and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say 
with his final breath — O Father ! — chiefly known to me by Thy rod — 
mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than 
to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity 
to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his 
God?” 

He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction covered his face 
with his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had de- 
parted, and he was left alone in the place. 

CHAPTER X 

A BOSOM FRIEND 

Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg 
there quite alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction 
some time. He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on 
the stove hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his face that 
little negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a jack-knife 


THE WHITE WHALE 45 

gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to himself in 
his heathenish way. 

But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, 
going to the table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his lap 
began counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at every fiftieth 
page as I fancied — stopping a moment, looking vacantly around him, 
and giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgle whistle of astonishment. 
He would then begin at the next fifty; seeming to commence at num- 
ber one each time, as though he could not count more than fifty, and 
it was only by such a large number of fifties being found together, 
that his astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited. 

With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, 
and hideously marred about the face — at least to my taste — his counte- 
nance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. 
You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I 
thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, 
deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that 
would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain 
lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not 
altogether maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and 
never had had a creditor. Whether it was, too, that his head being 
shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and 
looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I will not venture 
to decide ; but certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent 
one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Wash- 
ington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same 
long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which 
were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly 
wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically 
developed. 

Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile 
to be looking out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my 
presence, never troubled himself with so much as a single glance ; but 
appeared wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous 
book. Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the 
night previous, and especially considering the affectionate arm I had 
found thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this in- 


46 


MOBY DICK; OR 

difference of his very strange. But savages are strange beings ; at times 
you do not know exactly how to take them. At first they are over- 
awing; their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wis- 
dom. I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or hut 
very little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances 
whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his ac- 
quaintances. All this struck me as mighty singular; yet upon second 
thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it. Here was a man 
some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn that 
is — which was the only way he could get there — thrown among people 
as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he 
seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content 
with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this 
was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard 
there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, 
we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon 
as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, 
I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have “broken 
his digester.” 

As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in 
that mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it 
then only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms 
gathering round the casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary 
twain ; the storm booming without in solemn swells ; I began to be sen- 
sible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. Ho more my 
splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish 
world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very 
indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilised hy- 
pocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights 
to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him. 
And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were 
the very magnets that thus drew me. I’ll try a pagan friend, thought 
I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy. I drew 
my bench near him, and made some friendly signs and hints, doing 
my best to talk with him meanwhile. At first he little noticed these 
advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last night’s hospi- 
talities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be bedfellows. 


THE WHITE WHALE 47 

I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a little 
complimented. 

We then turned over the book together, and I endeavoured to ex- 
plain to him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few 
pictures that were in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest ; and from 
that we went to jabbering the best we could about the various outer 
sights to be seen in this famous town. Soon I proposed a social smoke ; 
and, producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. 
And there we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keep- 
ing it regularly passing between us. 

If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan’s 
breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left 
us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly 
as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead 
against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we 
were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom 
friends ; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a country- 
man, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too pre- 
mature, a thing to be much distrusted ; but in this simple savage those 
old rules would not apply. 

After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room 
together. He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his 
enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out some 
thirty dollars in silver ; then spreading them on the table, and mechani- 
cally dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of them towards 
me, and said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he si- 
lenced me by pouring them into my trousers’ pockets. I let them stay. 
He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed 
the paper fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he 
seemed anxious for me to join him; but well knowing what was to 
follow, I deliberated a moment whether, in case he invited me, I would 
comply or otherwise. 

I was a good Christian ; bom and bred in the bosom of the infallible 
Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolater 
in worshipping his piece of wood ? But what is worship ? thought I. 
But what is worship ? — to do the will of God — that is worship. And 
what is the will of God? — to do to my fellowman what I would have 


48 


MOBY DICK; OR 

my fellowman to do to me — that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg 
is my fellowman. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do 
to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of 
worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I 
must turn idolater. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the 
innocent little idol ; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg ; salaamed 
before him twice or thrice ; kissed his nose ; and that done, we undressed 
and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world. 
But we did not go to sleep without some little chat. 

How it is I know not ; but there is no place like a bed for confidential 
disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the 
very bottom of their souls to each other ; and some old couples often lie 
and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, lay I and 
Queequeg — a cosy, loving pair. 

CHAPTER XI 

NIGHTGOWN 

We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, 
when, at last, by reason of our confabulations what little nappishness 
remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again, 
though daybreak was yet some way down the future. 

Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent posi- 
tion began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found our- 
selves sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against 
the headboard with our four knees drawn up close together, and our 
two noses bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans. 
We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of 
doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in 
the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, 
some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this 
world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in 
itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and 
have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable 
any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your 
nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, 
in general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably 


THE WHITE WHALE 


49 


warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished 
with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For 
the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket 
between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then 
there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal. 

He had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when 
all at once I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets, 
whether by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way 
of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the 
snugness of being in bed : because no man can ever feel his own identity 
aright except his eyes he closed ; as if darkness were indeed the proper 
element of our essences, though light he more congenial to our clayey 
part. Upon opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant 
and self-created darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the 
unilluminated twelve-o’clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable re- 
vulsion. Uor did I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that per- 
haps it were best to strike a light, seeing that we were so wide awake ; 
and besides he felt a strong desire to have a few quiet puffs from his 
tomahawk. Be it said, that though I had felt such a strong repugnance 
to his smoking in the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff 
prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them. For now I liked 
nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, be- 
cause he seemed to he full of such serene household joy then. I no 
more felt unduly concerned for the landlord’s policy of insurance. I 
was only alive to the condensed confidential comfortableness of sharing 
a pipe and a blanket with a real friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn 
about our shoulders, we now passed the tomahawk from one to the 
other, till slowly there grew over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, 
illuminated by the flame of the new-lit lamp. 

Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away 
to far distant scenes, I know not, hut he now spoke of his native island ; 
and, eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and tell it. He 
gladly complied. Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a 
few of his words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more 
familiar with his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the 
whole story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I give. 


50 


MOBY DICK; OR 


CHAPTER XII 

BIOGRAPHICAL 

Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West 
and South. It is not down in any map ; true places never are. 

When a new-hatched savage, running wild about his native woodlands 
in a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green 
sapling; even then, in Queequeg’ s ambitious soul, lurked a strong de- 
sire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler 
or two. His father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High 
Priest ; and on the maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives 
of unconquerable warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins — 
royal stuff ; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity 
he nourished in his untutored youth. 

A Sag Harbour ship visited his father’s hay, and Queequeg sought 
a passage to Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement 
of seamen, spurned his suit ; and not all the King his father’s influence 
could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he 
paddled off to a distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through 
when she quitted the island. On one side was a coral reef; on the 
other a low tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew 
out into the water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, 
with its prow seaward, he sat down in the stem, paddle low in hand; 
and when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained 
her side; with one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his 
canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing himself at full length 
upon the deck, grappled a ring-holt there, and swore not to let it go, 
though hacked in pieces. 

In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended 
a cutlass over his naked wrists ; Queequeg was the son of a King, and 
Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his 
wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented, and told 
him he might make himself at home. But this fine young savage — 
this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the captain’s cabin. They put 
him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like 
the Czar Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Quee- 


51 


the white whale 

queg disdained no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain 
the power of enlightening his untutored countrymen. For at bottom — 
so he told me — he was actuated by a profound desire to learn among the 
Christians the arts whereby to make his people still happier than they 
were ; and more than that, still better than they were. But, alas ! the 
practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could 
be both miserable and wicked ; infinitely more so than all his father’s 
heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag Harbour; and seeing what the 
sailors did there; and then going on to Uantucket, and seeing how they 
spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for 
lost. Thought he, it’s a wicked world in all meridians ; I’ll die a pagan. 

And thus an old idolater at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, 
wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer 
ways about him, though now some time from home. 

By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going hack, and 
having a coronation ; since he might now consider his father dead and 
gone, he being very old and feeble at the last accounts. He answered 
no, not yet; and added that he was fearful Christianity, or rather 
Christians, had unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne 
of thirty pagan Kings before him. But by and by, he said, he would 
return, — as soon as he felt himself baptized again. For the nonce, 
however, he proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four 
oceans. They had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron 
was in lieu of a sceptre now. 

I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his 
future movements. He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. 
Upon this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed 
him of my intention to sail out of Hantucket, as being the most promis- 
ing port for an adventurous whaleman to embark from. He at once 
resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard the same vessel, 
get into the same watch, the same boat, the same mess with me, in 
short to share my every hap; with both my hands in his, boldly dip 
into the pot-luck of both worlds. To all this I joyously assented; for 
besides the affection I now felt for Queequeg, he was an experienced 
harpooneer, and as such, could not fail to be of great usefulness to one, 
who, like me, was wholly ignorant of the mysteries of whaling, 
though well acquainted with the sea, as known to merchant seamen. 


52 


MOBY DICK; OR 

His story being ended with his pipe’s last dying puff, Queequeg em- 
braced me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the 
light, we rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon 
were sleeping. 


CHAPTER XIII 

WHEELBARROW 

Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a 
barber, for a block, I settled my own and comrade’s bill; using, how- 
ever, my comrade’s money. The grinning landlord, as well as the 
boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had 
sprung up between me and Queequeg — especially as Peter Coffin’s 
cock-and-bull stories had previously so much alarmed me about him. 

We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including 
my own poor carpet-bag, and Queequeg’ s canvas sack and hammock, 
away we went down to the Moss , the little Nantucket packet schooner 
moored at the wharf. As we were going along the people stared ; not at 
Queequeg so much — for they were used to seeing cannibals like him 
in their streets, — but at seeing him and me upon such confidential 
terms. But we heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by 
turns, and Queequeg now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on 
his harpoon barbs. I asked him why he carried such a troublesome 
thing with him ashore, and whether all whaling ships did not find 
their own harpoons. To this, in substance, he replied, that though 
what I hinted was true enough, yet he had a particular affection for 
his own harpoon, because it was of assured stuff, well tried in many a 
mortal combat, and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales. In 
short, like many inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmers’ 
meadows armed with their own scythes — though in no wise obliged to 
furnish them — even so, Queequeg, for his own private reasons, pre- 
ferred his own harpoon. 

Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story 
about the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbour. 
The owners of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry 
his heavy chest to his boarding-house. Not to seem ignorant about 


THE WHITE WHALE 53 

the thing — though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise 
way in which to manage the barrow — Queequeg puts his chest upon 
it ; lashes it fast ; and then shoulders the harrow and marches up the 
wharf. “Why,” said I, “Queequeg, you might have known better than 
that, one would think. Didn’t the people laugh ?” 

Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of 
Kokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water 
of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; 
and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the 
braided mat where the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant 
ship once touched at Kokovoko, and i»ts commander — from all accounts, 
a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain — this 
commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg’s sister, a 
pretty young princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding 
guests were assembled at the bride’s bamboo cottage, this Captain 
marches in, and being assigned the post of honour, places himself over 
against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his Majesty 
the King, Queequeg’s father. Grace being said — for those people have 
their grace as well as we — though Queequeg told me that unlike us, 
who at such times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, 
copying the ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts — 
grace, I say, being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the im- 
. memorial ceremony of the island : that is, dipping his consecrated and 
consecrating fingers into the howl before the blessed beverage circulates. 
Seeing himself placed next to the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and 
thinking himself — being Captain of a ship — as having plain precedence 
over a mere King, especially in the King’s own house — the Captain 
coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punchbowl ; — taking it I sup- 
pose for a huge finger-glass. “How,” said Queequeg, “what you tink 
now ? — Didn’t our people laugh ?” 

At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on hoard the 
schooner. Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On one 
side, Hew Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees 
all glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks 
on casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world- 
wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored at last ; while from 
others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of 


54 


MOBY DICK; OR 

fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were 
on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only be- 
gins a second ; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for 
ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of 
all earthly effort. 

Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the 
little Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his 
snortings. How I snuffed that Tartar air ! — how I spurned that turn- 
pike earth ! — that common highway all over dented with the marks 
of slavish heels and hoofs ; and turned me to admire the magnanimity 
of the sea which will permit no records. 

At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with 
me. His dusky nostrils swelled apart ; he showed his filed and pointed 
teeth. On, on we flew ; and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to 
the blast; ducked and dived her bows as a slave before the Sultan. 
Sideways leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like 
a wire ; the two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes. 
So full of this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the plunging bow- 
sprit, that for some time we did not notice the jeering glances of the 
passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow-be- 
ings should be so companionable; as though a white man were any- 
thing more dignified than a whitewashed negro. But there were some 
boobies and bumpkins there, who, by their intense greenness, must have 
come from the heart and centre of all verdure. Queequeg caught one 
of these young saplings mimicking him behind his back. I thought 
the bumpkin’s hour of doom was come. Dropping his harpoon, the 
brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by an almost miraculous 
dexterity and strength sent him high up bodily into the air; then 
slightly tapping his stem in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with 
bursting lungs upon his feet, while Queequeg, turning his back upon 
him, lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to me for a puff. 

“Capting! Capting!” yelled the bumpkin, running towards that offi- 
cer; “Capting, Capting, here’s the devil.” 

“Hallo, you sir,” cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking 
up to Queequeg, “what in thunder do you mean by that ? Don’t you 
know you might have killed that chap ?” 

“What him say ?” said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me. 


THE WHITE WHALE 55 

“He say,” said I, “that you came near kill-e that man there, point- 
ing to the still shivering greenhorn. 

“Kill-e,” cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into ah unearthly 
expression of disdain; “ah! him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e 
so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!” 

“Look you,” roared the Captain, “I’ll kill-e you , you can- 
nibal, if you try any more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your 
eye.” 

But it so happened just then, that it was nigh time for the Captain 
to mind his own eye. The prodigious strain upon the mainsail had 
parted the weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom was now flying from 
side to side, completely sweeping the entire afterpart of the deck. The 
poor fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept over- 
board ; all hands were in a panic ; and to attempt snatching at the boom 
to stay it, seemed madness. It flew from right to left, and back again, 
almost in one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed on the point 
of snapping into splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed 
capable of being done ; those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood 
eyeing the boom as if it were the lower jaw of an exasperated whale. 
In the midst of this consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his 
knees, and crawling under the path of the boom, whipped hold of a 
rope, secured one end to the bulwarks, and then flinging the other like 
a lasso, caught it round the boom as it swept over his head, and at the 
next jerk, the spar was that way trapped, and all was safe. The 
schooner was run into the wind, and while the hands were clearing away 
the stern boat, Queequeg, stripped to the waist, darted from the side 
with a long living arc of a leap. For three minutes or more he was 
seen swimming like a dog, throwing his long arms straight out before 
him, and by turns revealing his brawny shoulders through the freezing 
foam. I looked at the grand and glorious fellow, hut saw no one to 
be saved. The greenhorn had gone down. Shooting himself perpen- 
dicularly from the water, Queequeg now took an instant’s glance around 
him, and seeming to see just how matters were, dived down and dis- 
appeared. A few minutes more, and he rose again, one arm still 
striking out, and with the other dragging a lifeless form. The boat 
soon picked them up. The poor bumpkin was restored. All hands 
yoted Queequeg a noble trump ; the Captain begged his pardon. From 


56 


MOBY DICK; OR 

that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Quee- 
queg took his last long dive. 

Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think 
that he at all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous 
Societies. He only asked for water — fresh water — something to wipe 
the brine off ; that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and lean- 
ing against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed 
to be saying to himself — “It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all merid- 
ians. We cannibals must help these Christians.” 


CHAPTER XIV 

NANTUCKET 

Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, 
after a fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket. 

Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real 
corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, 
more lonely than the Eddystone Lighthouse. Look at it — a mere hil- 
lock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background. There is 
more sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute 
for blotting-paper. Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have 
to plant weeds there, they don’t grow naturally; that they import Can- 
ada thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a 
leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about 
like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools 
before their houses, to get Under the shade in summer time; that one 
blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day’s walk a prairie ; 
that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snowshoos; 
that they are so shut up, belted about, every way enclosed, surrounded, 
and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and 
tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of 
sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no 
Illinois. 

Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was 
settled by the red men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle 
swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried off an infant 


THE WHITE WHALE 57 

Indian in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw the child borne 
out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved to follow in the same 
direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage they dis- 
covered the island, and there they found an empty ivory casket, — the 
poor little Indian’s skeleton. 

What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, horn on a beach, should 
take to the sea for a livelihood ! They first caught crabs and quohogs 
in the sands ; grown holder, they waded out with nets for mackerel ; 
more experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and, at 
last, launching a navy of great ships on the sea, explored this watery 
world ; put an incessant belt of circumnavigation round it : peeped in at 
Behring’s Straits.; and in all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting 
war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood ; most 
monstrous and most mountainous ! That Himmalehan, salt-sea Masto- 
don, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his 
very panics are more to he dreaded than his most fearless and malicious 
assaults ! 

And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea-hermits, issuing 
from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world 
like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, 
Pacific, and Indian Oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let 
America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the 
English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from 
the sun; two-thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. 
For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen 
having hut a right of way through it. Merchant ships are hut exten- 
sion bridges ; armed ones hut floating forts ; even pirates and privateers, 
though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder 
other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking 
to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, 
he alone resides and riots on the sea ; he alone, in Bible language, goes 
down to it in ships ; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. 
There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would 
not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He 
lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the 
waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years 
he knows not the land ; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like 


58 MOBY DICK; OR 

another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. 
With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to 
sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of 
land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very 
pillow rush herds of walruses and whales. 


CHAPTER XV 

CHOWDER 

It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly to 
anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore ; so we could attend to no busi- 
ness that day, at least none but a supper and a bed. The landlord of 
the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the 
Twy Pots, whom he asserted to he the proprietor of one of the best kept 
hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured us that Cousin 
Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders. In short, he 
plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck at 
the Twy Pots. But the direction he had given us about keeping a 
yellow warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened a white church to 
the larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard hand till we made a 
corner three points to the starboard, and that done, then ask the first 
man we met where the place was : these crooked directions of his very 
much puzzled us at first, especially as, at the outset, Queequeg insisted 
that the yellow warehouse — our first point of departure — must be left 
on the larboard hand, whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to say it 
was on the starboard. However, by dint of beating about a little in the 
dark, and now and then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to inquire 
the way, we at' last came to something which there was no mistaking. 

Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses’ 
ears, swung from the cross-trees of an old topmast, planted in front of 
an old doorway. The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the 
other side, so that this old topmast looked not a little like a gallows. 
Perhaps I was oversensitive to such impressions at the time, but I 
could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort 
of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns ; yes, 


59 


THE WHITE WHALE 

two of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It’s ominous, thinks 
I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; 
tombstones staring at me in the whalemen’s chapel ; and here a gallows ! 
and a pair of prodigious black pots too ! Are these last throwing out 
oblique hints touching Tophet ? 

I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman 
with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn, 
under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an injured 
eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple woollen 
shirt. 

“Get along with ye,” said she to the man, “or I’ll be combing ye !” 

“Come on, Queequeg,” said I, “all right. There’s Mrs. Hussey.” 

And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but 
leaving Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. 
Upon making known our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, 
postponing further scolding for the present ushered us into a little 
room, and seating us a,t a table spread with the relics of a recently 
concluded repast, turned round to us and said — “Clam or Cod ?” 

“What’s that about Cods, ma’am?” said I, with much politeness. 

“Clam or Cod ?” she repeated. 

“A clam for supper ? a cold clam ; is that what you mean, Mrs. Hus- 
sey ?” says I ; “but that’s a rather cold and clammy reception in the 
winter time, ain’t it, Mrs. Hussey ?” 

But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple 
shirt, who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing 
but the word “clam,” Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door leading 
to the kitchen, and bawling out “clam for two,” disappeared. 

“Queequeg,” said I, “do you think that we can make out a supper for 
us both on one clam ?” 

However, a warm savoury steam from the kitchen served to belie the 
apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chow- 
der came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet 
friends ! harken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely 
bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted 
pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and 
plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being 
sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his 


60 


MOBY DICK; OR 

favourite fishy food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly 
excellent, we despatched it with great expedition: when leaning back 
a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. Hussey’s clam and cod announce- 
ment, I thought I would try a little experiment. Stepping to the 
kitchen door, I uttered the word “cod” with great emphasis, and re- 
sumed my seat. In a few moments the savoury steam came forth again, 
but with a different flavour, and in good time a fine cod-chowder was 
placed before us. 

We resumed business ; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks 
I to myself, I wonder now if this has any effect on the head ? What’s 
that stultifying s'aying about chowder-headed people ? “But look, Quee- 
queg, ain’t that a live eel in your bowl ? Where’s your harpoon ?” 

Fishiest of all fishy places was the Twy Pots, which well deserved its 
name ; for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for 
breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you 
began to look for fishbones coming through your clothes. The area be- 
fore the house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a pol- 
ished necklace of codfish vertebrae; and Hosea Hussey had his account 
books bound in superior old shark-skin. There was a fishy flavour to 
the milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning 
happening to taka a stroll along the beach among some fishermen’s 
boats, I saw Hosea’s brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and march- 
ing along the sand with each foot in a cod’s decapitated head, looking 
very slipshod, I assure ye. 

Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hus- 
sey concerning the nearest way to bed ; but, as Queequeg was about to 
precede me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her arms, and demanded 
his harpoon ; she allowed no harpoon in her chambers. “Why not ?” 
said I ; “every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon — but why not !” 
“Because it’s dangerous,” says she. “Ever since young Stiggs coming 
from that unfort’nt v’y’ge of his, when he was gone four years and a half, 
with only three barrels of ile , was found dead in my first floor back, with 
his harpoon in his side ; ever since then I allow no boarders to take sich 
dangerous weapons in their rooms a-night. So, Mr. Queequeg” (for she 
learned his name), “I will just take this here iron, and keep it for you 
till morning. But the chowder ; clam or cod to-morrow for breakfast, 
men ?” 


THE WHITE WHALE «i 


“Both,” says I : a and let’s have a. couple of smoked herring by way 
of variety.” 


CHAPTER XVI 

THE SHIP 

Ih bed we concocted our plans for the morrow. But to my surprise and 
no small concern, Queequeg now gave me to understand that he had been 
diligently consulting Yojo — the name of his black little god — and Yojo 
had told him two or three times over, and strongly insisted upon it every 
way, that instead of our going together among the whaling-fleet in har- 
bour, and in concert selecting our craft; instead of this, I say, Yojo 
earnestly enjoined that the selection of the ship should rest wholly with 
me, inasmuch as Yojo proposed befriending us ; and, in order to do so, 
had already pitched upon a vessel, which, if left to myself, I, Ishmael, 
should infallibly light upon, for all the world as though it had turned 
out by chance; and in that vessel I must immediately ship myself, for 
the present irrespective of Queequeg. 

I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed 
great confidence in the excellence of Yojo’s judgment and surprising 
forecast of things; and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, as a 
rather good sold of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the whole, 
but in all cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs. 

How, this plan of Queequeg’s, or rather Yojo’s, touching the selection 
of our craft ; I did not like that plan at all. I had not a little relied 
upon Queequeg’s sagacity to point out the whaler best fitted to carry us 
and our fortunes securely; but as all my remonstrances produced no 
effect upon Queequeg, I was obliged to acquiesce; and accordingly pre- 
pared to set about this business with a determined rushing sort of energy 
and vigour, that should quickly settle that trifling little affair. 

Hext morning early, leaving Queequeg shut up with Yojo in our little 
bedroom — for it seemed that it was some sort of Lent or Ramadan, or 
day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer with Queequeg and Yojo that 
day; how it was I never could find out, for, though I applied myself to 
it several times, I never could master his religion leaving Queequeg, 
then, fasting on his tomahawk-pipe, and Yojo warming himself at his 


62 


MOBY DICK; OR 

sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied out among the shipping. After 
much prolonged sauntering and many random inquiries, I learnt that 
there were three ships up for three-years’ voyages — the Devil-dam , the 
Tit-bit , and the Pequod. Devil-dam , I do not know the origin of; Tit- 
bit is obvious; Pequod , you will no doubt remember, was the name of 
a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians, now extinct as the ancient 
Medes. I peered and pryed about the Devil-dam: from her, hopped 
over to the Tit-bit; and, finally, going on hoard the Pequod , looked 
around her for a moment, and then decided that this was the very ship 
for us. 

You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I 
know; — square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-hox 
galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such 
a rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod . She was a ship of the 
old school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed 
look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons 
and calms of all four oceans, her old hull’s complexion was darkened 
like a French grenadier’s, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. 
Her venerable hows looked bearded. Her masts — cut somewhere bn 
the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a 
gale — her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings 
of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the 
pilgrim-worshipped flagstone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket 
bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and mar- 
vellous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than 
half a century she had followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years her 
chief mate, before he commanded another vessel of his own, and now 
a retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the Pequod , — 
this old Peleg, during the term of his chiefmateship, had built upon 
her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness 
both of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be 
Thorkhill-Hake’s carved buckler or bedstead. She was apparelled like 
any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of 
polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies — a cannibal of a craft, 
tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, 
her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous 
jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for 


THE WHITE WHALE 63 

pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews 
ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled through 
sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend 
helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, 
curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary 
foe. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like 
the Tartar, when he holds hack his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. 
A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy ! All noble things are 
touched with that. 

Now when* I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having 
authority, in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, 
at first I saw nobody; but I eould not well overlook a strange sort of 
tent, or rather wigwam, pitched a- little behind the mainmast. It 
seemed only a temporary erection used in port. It was of a conical 
shape, some ten feet high ; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber 
black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the 
right-whale. Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of 
these slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at 
the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres waved 
to and fro like the top-knot on some old Pottowattamie Sachem’s head. 
A triangular opening faced towards the bows of the ship so that the 
insider commanded a complete view forward. 

And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one 
who by his aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, 
and the ship’s work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the 
burden of command. He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, 
wriggling all over with curious carving; and the bottom of which was 
formed of a stout interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the 
wigwam was constructed. 

There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance 
of the elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old 
seamen, and heavily rolled up in pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style; 
only there was a fine and almost microscopic network of the minutest 
wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from his 
continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to windward ; 
— for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed together. 
Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl. 


64 MOBY DICK; OR 

“Is this the Captain of the PequodV ’ said I, advancing to the door 
of the tent. 

“Supposing it be the Captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want 
of him ?” he demanded. 

“I was thinking of shipping.” 

“Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou art no Nantucketer — ever been 
in a stove boat ?” 

“No, sir, I never have.” 

“Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say—eh V 9 

“Nothing, sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I’ve been 
several voyages in the merchant service, and I think that ” 

“Marchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost 
see that leg ? — I’ll take that leg. away from thy stern, if ever thou 
talkest of the marchant service to me again. Marchant service, in- 
deed ! I suppose now ye feel considerable proud of having served in 
those marchant ships. But flukes ! man, what makes thee want to go 
a- whaling, eh ? — it looks a little suspicious, don’t it, eh ? — Hast not 
been a pirate, hast thou ? — Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst thou ? 
— Dost not think of murdering the officers when thou gettest to .sea?” 

I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the 
mask of these half-humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an in- 
sulated Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and 
rather distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod 
or the Vineyard. 

“But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I 
think of shipping ye.” 

“Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world.” 

“Want to see what whaling is, eh ? Have ye clapped eye on Captain 
Ahab ?” 

“Who is Captain Ahab, sir?” 

“Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship.” 

“I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain 
himself.” 

“Thou ail; speaking to Captain Peleg — that’s who ye are speaking 
to, young man. It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the 
Pequod fitted out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, in- 
cluding crew. We are part owners and agents. But as I was going 


65 


THE WHITE WHALE 

to say, if thou wantest to know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, 
I can put ye in a way of finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, 
past backing out. Clap eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou 
wilt find that he has only one leg.” 

“What do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale?” 

“Lost by a whale ! Young man, come nearer to me : it was de- 
voured, chewed up, crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever 
chipped a boat! — ah, ah!” 

I was a little alarmed about his energy, perhaps also a little touched 
at the hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly 
as I could, “What you say is no doubt true enough, sir ; hut how could 
I know there was any peculiar ferocity in that particular whale, 
though indeed I might have inferred as much from the simple fact 
of the accident.” 

“Look ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d’ye see; 
thou dost not talk shark a bit. Sure , ye’ve been to sea before now; 
sure of that?” 

“Sir,” said I, “I thought I told you that I had been four voyages 
in the merchant ” 

“Hard down out of that ! Mind what I said about the marchant 
service — don’t aggravate me — I won’t have it. But let us understand 
each other. I have given thee a hint about what whaling is; do ye 
yet feel inclined for it?” 

“I do, sir.” 

“Very good. How, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a 
live whale’s throat, and then jump after it ? Answer, quick !” 

“I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so ; not to be 
got rid of, that is; which I don’t take to he the fact.” 

“Good again. How then, thou not only wantest to go a- whaling, 
to find out by experience what whaling is, but ye also want to go in 
order to see the world? Was not that what ye said? I thought so. 
Well then, just step forward there, and take a peep over the weather- 
bow, and then back to me and tell me what ye see there.” 

Lor a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not 
knowing exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest. 
But concentrating all his crow’s feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg 
started me on the errand. 


66 


MOBY DICK; OR 

Going forward and glancing over the weather-how, I perceived that 
the ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely 
pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, hut 
exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that 
I could see. 

“Well, what’s the report?” said Peleg when I came back; “what did 
ye see?” 

“Not much,” I replied — “nothing hut water; considerable horizon 
though, and there’s a squall coming up, I think.” 

“Well, what dost thou think then of seeing the world ? Dio ye wish 
to go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can’t ye see the 
world where you stand?” 

I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would ; and 
the Pequod was as good a ship as any — I thought the best — and all 
this I now repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so determined, he expressed 
his willingness to ship me. 

“And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off,” he added — 
“come along with ye.” And so saying, he led the way below deck into 
the cabin. 

Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon 
and surprising figure. It turned out to he Captain Bildad, who along 
with Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the 
other shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a 
crowd of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery 
wards; each owning about the value of a timber head, or a foot of 
plank, or a nail or two in the ship. People in Nantucket invest their 
money in whaling vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved 
state stocks bringing in good interest. 

Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was 
a Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and 
to this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure 
the peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modi- 
fied by things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these 
same Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale- 
hunters. They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a ven- 
geance. 

So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with 


67 


THE WHITE WHALE 

Scripture names — a singularly common fashion on the island — and 
in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of 
the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless 
adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unout- 
grown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy 
a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when 
these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with 
a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness 
and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and 
beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think 
untraditionally and independently ; receiving all nature’s sweet or 
savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and con- 
fiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental 
advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language — that man 
makes one in a whole nation’s census — a mighty pageant creature, 
formed for noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, 
dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he 
have what seems a half wilful over-ruling morbidness at the bottom 
of his nature. For all men tragically great are made so through a 
certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal 
greatness is but disease. But, as yet we have not to do with such an 
one, but with quite another; and still a man, who, if indeed peculiar, 
it only results again from another phase of the Quaker, modified by 
individual circumstances. 

Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whale- 
man. But unlike Captain Peleg — who cared not to rush for what was 
called serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things 
the veriest of all trifles — Captain Bildad had not only been originally 
educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but 
all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely is- 
land creatures, round the Horn — all that had not moved this native 
born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his 
vest. Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of common 
consistency about worthy Captain Bildad. Though refusing, from con- 
scientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself 
had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn 
foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled 


68 


MOBY DICK; OR 

tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative 
evening of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the 
reminiscence, I do not know ; but it did not seem to concern him much, 
and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible con- 
clusion that a man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world 
quite another. This world pays dividends. Rising from a little 
cabin-boy in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a 
broad shad-bellied waistcoat; from that becoming boatheader, chief 
mate, and captain, and finally a ship owner; Bildad, as I hinted be- 
fore, had concluded his adventurous career by wholly retiring from 
active life at the goodly age of sixty, and dedicating his remaining 
days to the quiet receiving of his well-earned income. 

How Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an incor- 
rigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard taskmaster. 
They told me in Hantucket, though it certainly seems a curious story, 
that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew upon arriving 
home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore exhausted 
and worn out. For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was 
certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used to 
swear, though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inor- 
dinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them. When 
Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his drab-coloured eye intently looking 
at you, made you feel completely nervous, till you could clutch some- 
thing — a hammer or a marling-spike, and go to work like mad, at some- 
thing or other, never mind what. Indolence and idleness perished 
from before him. His own person was the exact embodiment of his 
utilitarian character. On his long, gaunt body, he carried no spare 
flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft, economical nap 
to it, like the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat. 

Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when 
I followed Captain Peleg down into the cabin. The space between the 
decks was small; and there, bolt-upright, sat old Bildad, who always 
sat so, and never leaned, and this to save his coat tails. His broad- 
brim was placed beside him ; his legs were stiffly crossed ; his drab ves- 
ture was buttoned up to his chin; and spectacles on nose, he seemed 
absorbed in reading from a ponderous volume. 

“Bildad,” cried Captain Peleg, “at it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have 


THE WHITE WHALE 69 

been studying those Scriptures, now, for the last thirty years, to my 
certain knowledge. How far ye got, Bildad?” 

As if long habituated to such profane talk from his old shipmate, 
Bildad, without noticing his present irreverence, quietly looked up, 
and seeing me, glanced again inquiringly towards Peleg. 

“He says he’s our man, Bildad,” said Peleg, “he wants to ship.” 

“Host thee?” said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round 
to me. 

“I dost” said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker. 

“What do ye think of him, Bildad ?” said Peleg. 

“He’ll do,” said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away 
at his book in a mumbling tone quite audible. 

I thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw, especially as 
Peleg, his friend and old shipmate, seemed such a blusterer. But I 
said nothing, only looking round me sharply. Peleg now threw open 
a chest, and drawing forth the ship’s articles, placed pen and ink before 
him, and seated himself at a little table. I began to think it was high 
time to settle with myself at what terms I would be willing to engage 
for the voyage. I was already aware that in the whaling business they 
paid no wages; but all hands, including the captain, received certain 
shares of the profits called lays, and that these lays were proportioned 
to the degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the 
ship’s company. I was also aware that being a green hand at whSing, 
my own lay would not be very large ; but considering that I was used 
to the sea, could steer a ship, splice a rope, and all that, I made no 
doubt that from all I had heard I should be offered at least the 275th 
lay — that is the 275th part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage, 
whatever that might eventually amount to. And though the 275th lay 
was what they call a rather long lay, yet it was better than nothing; 
and if we had a lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay for the clothing 
I would wear out on it, not to speak of my three years’ beef and board, 
for which I would not have to pay one stiver. 

It might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a 
princely fortune — and so it was, a very poor way indeed. But I am 
one of those that never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite 
content if the world is ready to board and lodge me, while I am put- 
ting up at this grim sign of the Thunder Cloud* Upon the whole, I 


70 MOBY DICK; OR 

thought that the 275th lay would he about the fair thing, but would 
not have been surprised had I been offered the 200th, considering I 
was of a broad-shouldered make. 

But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about 
receiving a generous share of the profits was this: Ashore, I had 
heard something of both Captain Peleg and his unaccountable old crony 
Bildad; how that they being the principal proprietors of the Pequod , 
therefore the other and more inconsiderable and scattered owners, left 
nearly the whole management of the ship’s affairs to these two. And 
I did not know but what the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty 
deal to say about shipping hands, especially as I now found him on 
board the Pequod , quite at home there in the cabin, and reading his 
Bible as if at his own fireside. Now while Peleg was vainly trying 
to mend a pen with his jack-knife, old Bildad, to my no small sur- 
prise, considering that he was such an interested party in these pro- 
ceedings; Bildad never heeded us, but went on mumbling to himself 
out of his book. “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, 
where moth ” 

“Well, Captain Bildad,” interrupted Peleg, “what d’ye say, what 
lay shall we give this young man ?” 

“Thou knowest best,” was the sepulchral reply, “the seven hundred 
and seventy-seventh wouldn’t be too much, would it ? — ‘where moth and 
rust do corrupt, but lay ’ ” 

Lay, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and 
seventy-seventh ! Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for one, 
shall not lay up many lays here below, where moth and rust do corrupt. 
It was an exceedingly long lay that, indeed ; and though from the mag- 
nitude of the figure it might at first deceive a landsman, yet the slight- 
est consideration will show that though seven hundred and seventy- 
seven is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to make a teenth 
of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and seventy- 
seventh part of a farthing is a good deal less than seven hundred and 
seventy-seven gold doubloons ; and so I thought at the time. 

“Why, blast your eyes, Bildad,” cried Peleg, “thou dost not want 
to swindle this young man! he must have more than that.” 

“Seven hundred and seventy-seven,” again said Bildad, without 


THE WHITE WHALE W 

lifting his eyes; and then went on mumbling — “for where your treas- 
ure is, there will your heart be also.” 

“I am going to put him down for the three hundredth,” said Peleg, 
“do ye hear that, Bildad! The three hundredth lay, I say.” 

Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said, 
“Captain Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider the 
duty thou owest to the other owners of this ship — widows and orphans, 
many of them — and that if we too abundantly reward the labours of 
this young man, we may be taking the bread from those widows and 
those orphans. The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay, Captain 
Peleg.” 

“Thou, Bildad!” roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about 
the cabin. “Blast ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice 
in these matters, I would afore now had a conscience to lug about 
that would be heavy enough to founder the largest ship that ever sailed 
round Cape Horn.” 

“Captain Peleg,” said Bildad steadily, “thy conscience may be 
drawing ten inches of water, or ten fathoms, I can’t tell; but as thou 
art still an impenitent man, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy 
conscience be but a leaky one; and will in the end sink thee founder- 
ing down to the fiery pit, Captain Peleg.” 

“Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing, 
ye insult me. It’s an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature 
that he’s bound to hell. Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that again 
to me, and start my soul-bolts, but I’ll — I’ll — yes, I’ll swallow a live 
goat with all his hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye canting, 
drab-coloured son of a wooden gun — a straight wake with ye !” 

As he thundered out this he made a rush at Bildad, but with a 
marvellous oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for that time eluded him. 

Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal and 
responsible owners of the ship, and feeling half a mind to give up 
all idea of sailing in a vessel so questionably owned and temporarily 
commanded, I stepped aside from the door to give egress to Bildad, 
who I made no doubt, was all eagerness to vanish from before the 
awakened wrath of Peleg. But to my astonishment, he sat down again 
on the transom very quietly, and seemed to have not the slightest 


72 


MOBY DICK; OR 

intention of withdrawing. He seemed quite used to impenitent Peleg 
and his ways. As for Peleg, after letting off his rage as he had, 
there seemed no more left in him, and he, too, sat down like a lamb, 
though he twitched a little as if still nervously agitated. “Whew!” 
he whistled at last — “the squall’s gone off to leeward, I think. Bildad, 
thou used to he good at sharpening a lance, mend that pen, will 
ye. My jack-knife here needs the grindstone. That’s he; thank ye, 
Bildad. How then, my young man, Ishmael’s thy name, didn’t ye 
say? Well then, down ye go here, Ishmael, for the three hundredth 
lay.” 

“Captain Peleg,” said I, “I have a friend with me who wants to 
ship too — shall I bring him down to-morrow?” 

“To be sure,” said Peleg. “Fetch him along, and we’ll look at 
him.” 

“What lay does he want?” groaned Bildad, glancing up from the 
book in which he had again been burying himself. 

“Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad,” said Peleg. “Has he 
ever whaled it any?” turning to me. 

“Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg.” 

“Well, bring him along then.” 

And, after signing the papers, off I went ; nothing doubting hut that 
I had done a good morning’s work, and that the Pequod was the identical 
ship that Yojo had provided to carry Queequeg and me round the 
Cape. 

But I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the 
captain with whom I was to sail yet remained unseen by me; though, 
indeed, in many cases, a whale ship will be completely fitted out, 
and receive all her crew on hoard, ere the captain makes himself 
visible by arriving to take command. For sometimes these voyages 
are so prolonged, and the short intervals at home so exceedingly brief, 
that if the captain have a family, or any absorbing concernment of 
that sort, he does not trouble himself much about his ship in port, 
but leaves her to the owners till all is ready for sea. However, it is 
always as well to have a look at him before irrevocably committing 
yourself into his hands. Turning back I accosted Captain Peleg, in- 
quiring where Captain Ahafc was to bq fo\md. 


73 


THE WHITE WHALE 

“And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab ? It’s all right enough ; 
thou art shipped.” 

“Yes, but I should like to see him.” 

“But I don’t think thou wilt be able to at present. I don’t know 
exactly what’s the matter with him ; but he keeps close inside the 
house; a sort of sick, and yet he don’t look so. In fact, he ain’t sick; 
but no, he isn’t well either. Anyhow, young man, he won’t always 
see me, so I don’t suppose he will thee. He’s a queer man, Captain 
Ahab — so some think — but a good one. Oh, thou’lt like him well 
enough; no fear, no fear. He’s a grand, ungodly, god-like man, 
Captain Ahab ; doesn’t speak much ; but, when he does speak, then 
you may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab’s above the 
common ; Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ’mong the cannibals ; 
been used td deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in 
mightier, stranger foes than whales. His lance! ay, the keenest and 
the surest that out of all our isle ! Oh ! he ain’t Captain Bildad ; no, 
and he ain’t Captain Peleg; lies Ahab , boy, and Ahab of old, thou 
knowest, was a crowned king !” 

“And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, 
did they not lick his blood ?” 

“Come hither to me — hither, hither,” said Peleg, with a significance 
in his eye that almost startled me. “Look ye, lad; never say that on 
board the Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not 
name himself. ’Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed 
mother, who died when he was only a twelvemonth old. And yet the 
old squaw Tistig, at Gay Head, said that the name would somehow 
prove prophetic. And, perhaps, other fools like her may tell thee the 
same. I wish to warn thee. It’s a lie. I know Captain Ahab well; 
I’ve sailed with him as mate years ago; I know what he is — a good 
man — not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but a swearing good man — 
something like me — only there’s a good deal more of him. Aye, aye, 
I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the passage 
home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell ; but it was the sharp 
shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that about, as any 
one might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage 
by that accursed whale, he’s been a kind of moody — desperate moody, 


74 


MOBY DICK; OR 

and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. And once for all, 
let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it’s better to sail with 
a moody good captain than a laughing bad one. So good-bye to thee — 
and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a wicked 
name. Besides, my boy, he has a wife — not three voyages wedded — 
a sweet, resigned girl. Think of that ; by that sweet girl that old man 
has a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in 
Ahab? Ho, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his 
humanities !” 

As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness. What had been 
incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain 
wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him. And somehow, at the 
time, I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him, but for I don’t know 
what, unless it was the cruel loss of his leg. And yet I also felt a 
strange awe of him ; but that sort of awe, which I cannot at all describe, 
was not exactly awe; I do not know what it was. But I felt it; and 
it did not disincline me towards him ; though I felt impatience at what 
seemed like mystery in him, so imperfectly as he was known 
to me then. However, my thoughts were at length carried in 
other directions, so that for the present dark Ahab slipped my 
mind. 


CHAP TEH XVII 

THE RAMADAN 

As Queequeg’s Ramadan, or Easting and Humiliation, was to con- 
tinue all day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards nightfall; 
for I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obli- 
gations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart 
to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toadstool ; or 
those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree 
of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before 
the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the 
inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name. 

I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in 


THE WHITE WHALE 75 

these things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, 
pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these 
subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most 
absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan; — but what of that? 
Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed 
to be content ; and there let him rest. All our arguing with him 
would not avail ; let him be, I say : and Heaven have mercy on us all — 
Presbyterians and Pagans alike — for we are all somehow dreadfully 
cracked about the head, and sadly need mending. 

Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and 
rituals must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door ; 
but no answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside. “Que&- 
queg,” said I softly, through the keyhole: — all silent. “I say Quee- 
queg ! why don’t you speak ? It’s I — Ishmael.” But all remained still 
as before. I began to grow alarmed. I had allowed him such abun- 
dant time; I thought he might have had an apoplectic fit. I looked 
through the keyhole; but the door opening into an odd comer of the 
room, the keyhole prospect was but a crooked and sinister one. I 
could only see part of the footboard of the bed and a line of the wall, 
but nothing more. I was surprised to behold resting against the wall 
the wooden shaft of Queequeg’s harpoon, which the landlady the even- 
ing previous had taken from him, before our mounting to the chamber. 
That’s strange, thought I; but at any rate, since the harpoon stands 
yonder, and he seldom or never goes abroad without it, therefore he 
must be inside here, and no possible mistake. 

“Queequeg! — Queequeg!” — 'all still. Something must have hap- 
pened. Apoplexy! I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly 
resisted. Running downstairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the 
first person I met — the chambermaid. “La! la !” she cried, “I thought 
something must be the matter. I went to make the bed after breakfast, 
and the door was locked ; and not a mouse to be heard ; and it’s been 
just so silent ever since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone 
off and locked your baggage in for safe-keeping. La! la, ma’am! — 
Mistress ! murder ! Mrs. Hussey ! apoplexy !” — and with these cries, she 
ran towards the kitchen, I following. 

Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a 
vinegar-cruet in the other, having just broken away from the occupation 


76 MOBY DICK; OR 

of attending to the castors, and scolding her little black hoy mean- 
time. 

“Woodhouse !” cried I, “which way to it ? Run for God’s sake, and 
fetch something to pry open the door — the axe ! — the axe ! — he’s had a 
stroke ; depend upon it !” — and so saying I was unmethodically rushing 
upstairs again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the 
mustard-pot and vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her countenance. 

“What’s the matter with you, young man ?” 

“Get the axe! For God’s sake, run for the doctor, some one, while 
I pry it open !” 

“Look here,” said the landlady, quickly putting down the vinegar- 
cruet, so as to have one hand free; “look here: are you talking about 
prying open any of my doors ?” — and with that she seized my arm. 
“What’s the matter with you? What’s the matter with you, ship- 
mate ?’ 

In as calm, hut rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to under- 
stand the whole case. Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet to 
one side of her nose, she ruminated for an instant ; then exclaimed — 
“Ho! I haven’t seen it since I put it there.” Running to a little 
closet under the landing of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, 
told me that Queequeg’s harpoon was missing. “He’s killed himself,” 
she cried. “It’s unfort’nate Stiggs done over again — there goes an- 
other counterpane 1 — God pity his poor mother ! — it will be the ruin 
of my house. Has the poor lad a sister ? Where’s that girl ? : — there, 
Betty, go to Snarles the Painter, and tell him to paint me a sign, 
with — ‘no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlour’ ; — 
might as well kill both birds at once. Kill ? The Lord be merciful to 
his ghost! What’s that noise there? You, young man, avast there!” 

And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to 
force open the door. 

“I don’t allow it; I won’t have my premises spoiled. Go for the 
locksmith, there’s one about a mile from here. But avast!” putting 
her hand in her side-pocket, “here’s a key that’ll fit, I guess ; let’s see.” 
And with that, she turned it in the lock ; but, alas ! Queequeg’s sup- 
plemental holt remained unwithdrawn within. 

“Have to hurst it open,” said I, and was running down the entry a 
little, for a good start, when the landlady caught at me, again vowing 


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THE WHITE WHALE 77 

I should not break down her premises ; but I tore from her, and with a 
sudden bodily rush dashed myself full against the mark. 

With a prodigious noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming 
against the w r all, sent the plaster to the ceiling; and there, good 
heavens! there sat Queequeg, altogether cool and self-collected; right 
in the middle of the room; squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo 
on the top of his head. He looked neither one way nor the other way, 
but sat like a carved image with scarce a sign of active life. 

“Queequeg,” said I, going up to him, “Queequeg, what’s the matter 
with you?” 

“He hain’t been a-sittin’ so all day, has he ?” said the landlady. 

But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him ; I almost felt 
like pushing him over, so as to change his position, for it was almost 
intolerable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally constrained; espe- 
cially, as in all probability he had been sitting so for upwards of eight 
or ten hours, going too without his regular meals. 

“Mrs. Hussey,” said I, “he’s alive at all events; so leave us, if 
you please, and I will see to this strange affair myself.” 

Closing the door upon the landlady, I endeavoured to prevail upon 
Queequeg to take a chair; but in vain. There he sat; and all he 
could do — for all my polite arts and blandishments — he would not 
move a peg, nor say a single word, nor even look at me, nor notice 
my presence in any, the slightest way. 

I wonder, thought I, if this can possibly be a part of his Ramadan; 
do they fast on their hams that way in his native island? It must 
be so; yes, it’s part of his creed, I suppose; well, then, let him rest; 
he’ll get up sooner or later, no doubt. It can’t last for ever, thank 
God, and his Ramadan only comes once a year ; and I don’t believe it’s 
very punctual then. 

I went down to supper. After sitting a long time listening to the 
long stories of some sailors who had just come from a plum-pudding 
voyage, as they called it (that is, a short whaling voyage in a schooner 
or brig, confined to the north of the Line, in the Atlantic Ocean only) ; 
after listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o’clock, I 
went upstairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg 
must certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination. But no ; 
there he was just where I had left him ; he had not stirred an inch. I 


78 


MOBY DICK; OR 

began to grow vexed with him; it seemed so downright senseless and 
insane to be sitting there all day and half the night on his hams in 
a cold room, holding a piece of wood on his head. 

“For heaven’s sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up 
and have some supper. You’ll starve; you’ll kill yourself, Queequeg.” 
But not a word did he reply. 

Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to 
sleep; and no doubt, before a great while, he would follow me. But 
previous to turning in, I took my heavy bearskin jacket, and threw 
it over him, as it promised to be a very cold night; and he had noth- 
ing but his ordinary round jacket on. For some time, do all I 
would, I could not get into the faintest doze. I had blown out the 
candle; and the mere thought of Queequeg — not four feet off — sitting 
there in that uneasy position, stark alone in the cold and dark; this 
made me really wretched. Think of it ; sleeping all night in the same 
room with a wideawake pagan on his hams in this dreary, unaccount- 
able Bamadan ! 

But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing more till 
break of day ; when, looking over the bedside, there squatted Queequeg, 
as if he had been screwed down to the floor. But as soon as the 
first glimpse of sun entered the window, up he got, with stiff and 
grating joints, but with a cheerful look; limped towards me where 
I lay ; pressed his forehead again against mine ; and said his Bamadan 
was over. 

Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person’s re- 
ligion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult 
any other person, because that other person doesn’t believe it also. But 
when a man’s religion becomes really frantic ; when it is a positive tor- 
ment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable 
inn to lodge in ; then I think it high time to take that individual aside 
and argue the point with him. 

And just so I now did with Queequeg. “Queequeg,” said I, “get 
into bed now, and lie and listen to me.” I then went on, beginning 
with the rise and progress of the primitive religions, and coming down 
to the various religions of the present time, during which time I 
laboured to show Queequeg that all fasts, voluntary or otherwise, were 
excessively bad for the digestion. 


79 


THE WHITE WHALE 

I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with 
dyspepsia ; expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it in. 
He said no ; only upon one memorable occasion. It was after a great 
feast given by his father the king, on the gaining of a great battle 
wherein fifty of the enemy had been killed by about two o’clock in the 
afternoon, and all cooked and eaten that very evening. 

“No more, Queequeg,” said I shuddering; “that will do”; for I 
knew the inferences without his further hinting them. I had seen a 
sailor who had visited that very island, and he told me that it was the 
custom, when a great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all the 
slain in the yard or garden of the victor ; and then, one by one, they 
were placed in great wooden trenchers, and garnished round like a 
pilau, with breadfruit and cocoanuts; and with some parsley in their 
mouths, were sent round with the victor’s compliments to all his friends, 
just as though these presents were so many Christmas turkeys. 

After all, I do not think that my remarks about religion made much 
impression upon Queequeg. Because, in the first place, he somehow 
seemed dull of hearing on that important subject, unless considered 
from his own point of view; and, in the second place, he did not more 
than one third understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would ; and, 
finally, he no doubt thought he knew a good deal more about the true 
religion than I did. He looked at me with a sort of condescending 
concern and compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such 
a sensible young man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan 
piety. 

At last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously 
hearty breakfast of chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady should 
not make much profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out to hoard 
the Pequod , sauntering along, and picking our teeth with halibut bones. 


CHAPTER XVIII 

HIS MARK 

As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, 
Queequeg carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice 


80 


MOBY DICK; OR 

loudly hailed us from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my 
friend was a cannibal, and furthermore announcing that he let no 
cannibals on board that craft, unless they previously produced their 
papers. 

“What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?” said I, now jumping 
on the bulwarks, and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf. 

“I mean,” he replied, “he must show his papers.” 

“Yes,” said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head 
from behind Peleg’ s, out of the wigwam. “He must show that he’s 
converted. Son of darkness,” he added, turning to Queequeg, “art 
thou at present in communion with any Christian church?” 

“Why,” said I, “he’s a member of the first Congregational Church” ; 
and I entered upon a long rigmarole story, touching the conversion 
of Queequeg, and concluded by saying that in the grand belief we all 
joined hands. 

“Splice, thou mean’st splice hands,” cried Peleg, drawing nearer. 
“Young man, you’d better ship for a missionary, instead of a foremast 
hand; I never heard a better sermon. Deacon Deuteronomy — why, 
Father Mapple himself couldn’t beat it, and he’s reckoned something. 
Come aboard, come aboard; never mind about the papers. I say, tell 
Quohog there — what’s that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. 
By the great anchor, what a harpoon he’s got there ! looks like good stuff 
that ; and he handles it about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your 
name is, did you ever stand in the head of a whale boat ? did you ever 
strike a fish ?” 

Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped 
upon the bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale 
boats hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and posing 
his harpoon, cried out in some such way as this — 

“Cap’ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him ? 
well, spose him one whale eye, well, den !” and taking sharp aim at it, 
he darted the iron right over old Bildad’s broad-brim, clean across the 
ship’s decks and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight. 

“How,” said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, “spos-ee him 
whale-e eye; why, dat whale dead.” 

“Quick, Bildad,” said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close 


81 


THE WHITE WHALE 

vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gang- 
way. “Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship’s papers. We 
must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. 
Look ye, Quohog, we’ll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that’s more than 
ever was given a harpooneer yet out of Nantucket.” 

So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg 
was soon enrolled among the same ship’s company to which I myself 
belonged. 

When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything 
ready for signing, he turned to me and said, “I guess Quohog there 
don’t know how to write, does he ? I say, Quohog, blast ye ! dost thou 
sign thy name or make thy mark?” 

But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before 
taken part in similar ceremonies, looked noways abashed; but taking 
the offered pen, copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact 
counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm; 
so that through Captain Peleg’s obstinate mistake touching his appel- 
lative, it stood something like this — 

Quohog. 
his X mark. 

Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing 
Queequeg, and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge 
pockets of his broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts, and 
selecting one entitled “The Latter Day Coming ; or No Time to Lose,” 
placed it in Queequeg’s hands, and then grasping them and the book 
with both his, looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, “Son of dark- 
ness, I must do my duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship, and 
feel concerned for the souls of all its crew ; if thou still clingest to thy 
pagan ways, which I sadly fear, I beseech thee, remain not for aye 
a Belial bondsman. Spurn the idol Bel, and the hideous dragon ; turn 
from the wrath to come ; mind thine eye, I say ; oh ! goodness gracious ! 
steer clear of the fiery pit!” 

Something of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad’s language, 
heterogeneously mixed with Scriptural and domestic phrases. 

“Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our harpoon- 


82 


MOBY DICK; OR 

eer,” cried Peleg. “Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers — it 
takes the shark out of ’em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who ain’t 
pretty sharkish. There was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest 
boat-header out of all Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the 
meeting, and never came to good. He got so frightened about his 
plaguy soul, that he shrinked and sheered away from whales, for fear 
of afterclaps, in case he got stove and went to Davy Jones.” 

“Peleg! Peleg!” said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, “thou 
thyself, as I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest, 
Peleg, what it is to have the fear of death ; how, then, canst thou prate 
in this ungodly guise? Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell 
me, when this same Pequod here had her three masts overboard in that 
typhoon on Japan, that same voyage when thou went mate with Cap- 
tain Ahab, didst thou not think of Death and the Judgment then?” 

“Hear him, hear him now,” cried Peleg, marching across the cabin, 
and thrusting his hands far down into his pockets, — “hear him, all of 
ye. Think of that ! When every moment we thought the ship would 
sink ! Death and the Judgment then ? What ? With all three masts 
making such an everlasting thundering against the side; and every sea 
breaking over us, fore and aft. Think of Death and the Judgment 
then? No! no time to think about Death then. Life was what Cap- 
tain Ahab and I was thinking of ; and how to save all hands — how to 
rig jury-masts — how to get into the nearest port ; that was what I was 
thinking of.” 

Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck, 
where we followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking 
some sail-makers who were mending a topsail in the waist. Now and 
then he stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of the tarred twine, 
which otherwise might have been wasted. 

CHAPTER XIX 

THE PEOPHET 

“Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship ?” 

Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod , and were sauntering away 
from the water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts ; 


88 


THE WHITE WHALE 

when the above words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before 
us, levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was hut 
shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and patched trousers; a rag of a 
black handkerchief investing his neck. A confluent small-pox had in 
all directions flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated 
ribbed bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up. 

“Have ye shipped in her ?” he repeated. 

“You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose,” said I, trying to gain a little 
more time for an uninterrupted look at him. 

“Aye, the Pequod — that ship there,” he said, drawing hack his 
whole arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with 
the fixed bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object. 

“Yes,” said I, “we have just signed the articles.” 

“Anything down there about your souls ?” 

“About what ?” 

“Oh, perhaps you haven’t got any,” he said quickly. “Ho matter 
though, I know many chaps that haven’t got any, — good luck to ’em; 
and they are all the better off for it. A soul’s a sort of a fifth wheel to a 
wagon.” 

“What are you jabbering about, shipmate?” said I. 

“He’s got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that 
sort in other chaps,” abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous em- 
phasis upon the word he. 

“Queequeg,” said I, “let’s go; this fellow has broken loose from 
somewhere ; he’s talking about something and somebody we don’t know.” 

“Stop!” cried the stranger. “Ye said true — ye haven’t seen Old 
Thunder yet, have ye ?” 

“Who’s Old Thunder ?” said I, again riveted with the insane earnest- 
ness of his manner. 

“Captain Ahab.” 

“What! the captain of our ship, the Pequod V’ 

“Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. 
Ye haven’t seen him yet, have ye ?” 

“Ho, we haven’t. He’s sick they say, but is getting better, and will 
be all right again before long.” 

“All right again before long !” laughed the stranger, with a solemnly 


84 


MOBY DICK; OR 

derisive sort of laugh. “Look ye; when Captain Ahab is all right, 
then this left arm of mine will be all right ; not before.” 

“What do you know about him ?” 

“What did they tell you about him? Say that!” 

“They didn’t tell much of anything about him ; only I’ve heard that 
he’s a good whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew.” 

“That’s true, that’s true: — -yes, both true enough. But yep must 
jump when he gives an order. Step and growl ; growl and go — that’s 
the word with Captain Ahab. But nothing about that thing that 
Happened to him off Cape Horn, long ago, when he lay like dead for 
three days and nights ; nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the 
Spaniard afore the altar in Santa? — heard nothing about that, eh? 
Nothing about the silver calabash he spat into? And nothing about 
his losing his leg last voyage, according to the prophecy? Didn’t ye 
hear a word about them matters and something more, eh? No, I 
don’t think ye did; how could ye? Who knows it? Not all Nan- 
tucket, I guess. But hows’ever, mayhap, ye’ve heard tell about the 
leg, and how he lost it ; ay, ye have heard of that, I dare say. Oh yes, 
that every one knows a’most — I mean they know he’s only one leg; 
and that a parmacetti took the other off.” 

“My friend,” said I, “what all this gibberish of yours is about, I 
don’t know, and I don’t much care; for it seems to me that you must 
be a little damaged in the head. But if you are speaking of Captain 
Ahab, of that ship there, the Pequod , then let me tell you, that I know 
all about the loss of his leg.” 

“All about it, eh — sure you do ? — all ?” 

“Pretty sure.” 

With finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like 
stranger stood a moment, as if in a troubled reverie; then starting a 
little, turned and said — “Ye’ve shipped, have ye? Names down on 
the papers? Well, well, what’s signed, is signed; and what’s to be, 
will be; and then again, perhaps it won’t be, after all. Anyhow, it’s 
all fixed and arranged a’ready ; and some sailors or other must go with 
him, I suppose ; as well these as any other men, God pity ’em ! .Morn- 
ing to ye, shipmates, morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I’m sorry 
I stopped ye.” 

Took here, friend,” said I, “if you have anything important to tell 


THE WHITE WHALE 85 

us, out with it; hut if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you are 
mistaken in your game ; that’s all I have to say.” 

“And it’s said very well, and I like to bear a chap talk up that way ; 
you are just the man for him — the likes of ye. Morning to ye, ship- 
mates, morning! Oh, when ye get there, tell ’em I’ve concluded not 
to make one of ’em.” 

“Ah, my dear fellow, you can’t fool us that way — you can’t fool us. 
It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a 
great secret in him.” 

“Morning to ye, shipmates, morning.” 

“Morning it is,” said I. “Come along, Queequeg, let’s leave this 
crazy man. But stop, tell me your name, will you ?” 

“Elijah.” 

Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each 
other’s fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was 
nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone 
perhaps above a hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and 
looking back as I did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us, 
though at a distance. Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I 
said nothing to Queequeg of his being behind, hut passed on with my 
comrade, anxious to see whether the stranger would turn the same 
corner that we did. He did; and then it seemed to me that he was 
dogging us, but with what intent I could not for the life of me imagine. 
This circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous, half-hinting, half-re- 
vealing, shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me all kinds of 
vague wonderments and half-apprehensions, and all connected with the 
Pequod ; and Captain Ahah; and the leg he had lost; and the Cape 
Horn fit ; and the silver calabash ; and what Captain Peleg had said of 
him, when I left the ship the day previous ; and the prediction of the 
squaw Tistig ; and the voyage we had bound ourselves to sail ; and a 
hundred other shadowy things. 

I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was 
really dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with 
Queequeg, and on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah 
passed on, without seeming to notice us. This relieved me; and once 
more — an d finally as it seemed to me — I pronounced him in my heart, 
a humbug. 


86 


MOBY DICK; OR 


CHAPTER XX 

ALL ASTIR 

A day or two passed^ and there was great activity aboard the Pequod. 
Hot only were the old sails being mended, but new sails were coming 
on board, and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging; in short, every- 
thing betokened that the ship’s preparations were hurrying to a close. 
Captain Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his wigwam 
keeping a sharp lookout upon the hands : Bildad did all the purchasing 
and providing at the stores ; and the men employed in the hold and on 
the rigging were working till long after nightfall. 

On the day following Queequeg’s signing the articles, word was 
given at all the inns where the ship’s company were stopping, that their 
chests must he on board before night, for there was no telling how soon 
the vessel might be sailing. So Queequeg and I got down our traps, 
resolving, however, to sleep ashore till the last. But it seems they al- 
ways give very long notice in these cases, and the ship did not sail for 
several days. But no wonder; there was a good deal to be done, and 
there is no telling how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod 
was fully equipped. 

Every one knows what a multitude of things — beds, saucepans, 
knives and forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what 
not, are indispensable to the business of housekeeping. Just so with 
whaling, which necessitates a three-years’ housekeeping upon the wide 
ocean, far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. 
And although this *also holds true of merchant vessels, yet not by any 
means to the same extent as with whalemen. For besides the great 
length of the whaling voyage, the numerous articles peculiar to the pros- 
ecution of the fishery, and the impossibility of replacing them at the 
remote harbours usually frequented, it must be remembered, that of 
all ships, whaling vessels are the most exposed to accidents of all kinds, 
and especially to the destruction and loss of the very things upon which 
the success of the voyage most depends. Hence, the spare boats, spare 
spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and spare everything, almost, but a 
spare captain and duplicate ship. 


THE WHITE WHALE 87 

At the period of our arrival at the island, the heaviest stowage of the 
P equod had been almost completed ; comprising her beef, bread, water, 
fuel, and iron hoops and staves. But, as before hinted, for some time 
there was a continual fetching and carrying on board of divers odds 
and ends of things, both large and small. 

Chief among those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain 
Bildad’s sister, a lean old lady of a most determined and indefatigable 
spirit, hut withal very kindhearted, who seemed resolved that, if she 
could help it, nothing should be found wanting in the P equod, after 
once fairly getting to sea. At one time she would come on board 
with a jar of pickles for the steward’s pantry; another time with a 
bunch of quills for the chief mate’s desk, where he kept his log ; a third 
time with a roll of flannel for the small of some one’s rheumatic back. 
Never did any woman better deserve her name, which was ’Charity — 
Aunt Charity, as everybody called her. And like a sister of charity 
— did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither, 
ready to turn her hand and heart to anything that promised to yield 
safety, comfort, and consolation to all on board a ship in which her be- 
loved brother Bildad was concerned, and in which she herself owned a 
score or two of well-saved dollars. 

But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming 
on board, as she did the last ’day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand, and 
a still longer whaling-lance in the other. Nor was Bildad himself nor 
Captain Peleg at all backward. As for Bildad, he carried -about with 
him a long list of the articles needed, and at every fresh arrival, down 
went his mark opposite the article upon the paper. Every once in a 
while Peleg came running out of his whalebone den, roaring at the men 
down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the masthead, and 
then concluded by roaring back into his wigwam. 

During these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the 
craft, and as often I asked about Captain Ahab, -and how he was, and 
when he was going to come on board his ship. To these questions they 
would answer, that he was getting better and better, and was expected 
aboard every day ; meantime, the two captains, Peleg and Bildad, could 
attend to everything necessary to fit the vessel for the voyage. If I had 
been downright honest with myself, I would have seen very plainly in 
my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long 


88 


MOBY DICK; OR 

a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be abso- 
lute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. 
But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he 
be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his 
suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. 
I said nothing, and tried to think nothing. 

At last it was given out that some time next day the ship would 
certainly sail. So next morning, Queequeg and I took a very early 
start. 


CHAPTEE XXI 

GOING ABOAKD 

It was nearly six o’clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when we 
drew nigh the wharf. 

“There are some sailors running ahead there, if I see right,” said I 
to Queequeg, “it can’t be shadows; she’s off by sunrise, I guess; come 
on !” 

“Avast!” cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming close 
behind us, laid a hand upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating 
itself between us, stood stooping forward a little, in the uncertain 
twilight, strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah. 

“Going aboard?” 

“Hands off, will you,” said I. 

“Lookee here,” said Queequeg, shaking himself, “go ’way !” 

“Ain’t going aboard, then?” 

“Yes, we are,” said I, “but what business is that of yours ? Do you 
know, Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?” 

“No, no, no; I wasn’t aware of that,” said Elijah, slowly and 
wonderingly looking from me to Queequeg, with the most unaccount- 
able glances. 

“Elijah,” said I, “you oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. 
We are going to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would prefer 
not to be detained.” 

“Ye be, be ye ? Coming back afore breakfast?” 

“He’s cracked, Queequeg,” said I ; “come on,” 


THE WHITE WHALE 89 

“Holloa!” cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed 
a few paces. 

“Never mind him,” said I, “Queequeg, come on.” 

But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand on 
my shoulder, said — “Did ye see anything looking like men going 
towards that ship a while ago ?” 

Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying, 
“Yes, I thought I did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be 
sure.” 

“Very dim, very dim,” said Elijah. “Morning to ye.” 

Once more we quitted him ; but once more he came softly after us ; 
and touching my shoulder again, said, “See if you can find ’em now, 
will ye?” 

“Find who?” 

“Morning to ye! morning to ye!” he rejoined, again moving off. 
“Oh ! I was going to warn ye against — but never mind, never mind — 
it’s all one, all in the family too ; — sharp frost this morning, ain’t it ? 
Good-bye to ye. Shan’t see ye again very soon, I guess ; unless it’s be- 
fore the Grand Jury.” And with these cracked words he finally de- 
parted, leaving me, for the moment, in no small wonderment at his 
frantic impudence. 

At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in pro- 
found quiet, not a soul moving. The cabin entrance was locked within ; 
the hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging. Going 
forward to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open. See- 
ing a light, we went down, and found only an old rigger there, wrapped 
in a tattered pea-jacket. He was thrown at whole length upon two 
chests, his face downwards and enclosed in his folded arms. The pro- 
foundest slumber slept upon him. 

“Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?” 
said I, looking dubiously at the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on 
the wharf, Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now alluded to; 
hence I would have thought myself to have been optically deceived in 
that matter, were it not for Elijah’s otherwise inexplicable question. 
But I beat the thing down; and again marking the sleeper, jocularly 
hinted to Queequeg that perhaps we had best sit up with the body; 


90 


MOBY DICK; OR 

telling him to establish himself accordingly. He put his hand upon 
the sleeper’s rear, as though feeling if it was soft enough; and then, 
without more ado, sat quietly down there. 

“Gracious! Queequeg, don’t sit there,” said I. 

“Oh ! perry dood seat,” said Queequeg, “my country way; won’t hurt 
him face.” 

“Face!” said I, “call that his face? very benevolent countenance 
then; hut how hard he breathes, he’s heaving himself; get off, Quee- 
queg, you are heavy, it’s grinding the face of the poor. Get off, 
Queequeg ! Look, he’ll twitch you off soon. I wonder he don’t wake.” 

Queequeg removed himself to just beyond the head of the sleeper, 
and lighted his tomahawk pipe. I sat at the feet. We kept the pipe 
passing over the sleeper, from one to the other. Meanwhile, upon 
questioning him in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave me to understand 
that, in his land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, 
the king, chiefs, and great people generally, were in the custom of 
fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans ; and to furnish a house 
comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy 
fellows, and lay them round in the piers and alcoves. Besides, it was 
very convenient on an excursion; much better than those garden- 
chairs which are convertible into walking-sticks ; upon occasion, a chief 
calling his attendant, and desiring him to make a settee of himself 
under a spreading tree, perhaps in some damp marshy place. 

While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the 
tomahawk from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the sleeper’s 
head. 

“What’s that for, Queequeg ?” 

“Perry easy, kill-e; oh, perry easy!” 

He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk- 
pipe, which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and 
soothed his soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger. 
The strong vapour now completely filling the contracted hole, it began 
to tell upon him. He breathed with a sort of muffledness ; then seemed 
troubled in the nose ; then revolved over once or twice ; then sat up and 
rubbed his eyes. 

“Holloa!” he breathed at last, “who he ye smokers?” 

“Shipped men,” answered I, “when does she sail?” 


THE WHITE WHALE 01 

“Ay, ay, ye are going in her, be ye ? She sails to-day. The Cap- 
tain came aboard last night.” 

“What Captain?— Ahab?” 

“Who but him indeed ?” 

I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, 
when we heard a noise on deck. 

“Holloa! Starbuck’ s astir,” said the rigger. “He’s a lively chief 
mate, that ; good man, and a pious ; but all alive now, I must turn 
to.” And so saying he went on deck, and we followed. 

It was now clear sunrise. Soon the crew came on board in twos 
and threes ; the riggers bestirred themselves ; the mates were actively 
engaged ; and several of the shore people were busy in bringing various 
last things on board. Meanwhile Captain Ahab remained invisibly 
enshrined within his cabin. 


CHAPTEE XXII 

MERRY CHRISTMAS 

At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship’s riggers, 
and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and after 
the ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a whaleboat, with her last 
gift — a nightcap for Stubb, the second mate, her brother-in-law, and a 
spare Bible for the steward — after all this, the two captains, Peleg and 
Bildad, issued from the cabin, and turning to the chief mate, Peleg 
said — 

“How, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right? Captain 
Ahab is all ready — just spoke to him — nothing more to be got from 
shore, eh? Well, call all hands, then. Muster ’em aft here — blast 
’em !” 

“Ho need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg,” said 
Bildad ; “but away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding.” 

How now! Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage, 
Captain Peleg and Captain Bildad were going it with a high hand on 
the quarter deck, just as if they were to be joint-commanders at sea, as 
well as to all appearances in port. And, as for Captain Ahab, no 


92 


MOBY DICK; OR 

sign of him was yet to be seen; only, they said he was in the cabin. 
But then, the idea was, that his presence was by no means necessary 
in getting the ship under weigh, and steering her well out to sea. 
Indeed, as that was not at all his proper business, but the pilot’s; and 
as he was not yet completely recovered — so they said — therefore, Cap- 
tain Ahab stayed below. And all this seemed natural enough; es- 
pecially as in the merchant service many captains never show them- 
selves on deck for a considerable time after heaving up the anchor, but 
remain over the cabin table, having a farewell merry-making with their 
shore friends, before they quit the ship for good with the pilot. 

But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Cap- 
tain Peleg was now all alive. He seemed to do most of the talking 
and commanding, and not Bildad. 

“Aft here, ye sons of bachelors,” he cried, as the sailors lingered at 
the mainmast. “Mr. Starbuck, drive ’em aft.” 

“Strike the tent there!” — was the next order. As I hinted before, 
this whalebone marquee was never pitched except in port; and on 
board the Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike the tent was 
well known to be the next thing to heaving up the anchor. 

“Man the capstan! Blood and Thunder — jump!” — was the next 
command, and the crew sprang for the handspikes. 

How, in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the 
pilot is the forward part of the ship. And here Bildad, who, with 
Peleg, be it known, in addition to his other offices, was one of the 
licensed pilots of the port — he being suspected to have got himself 
made a pilot in order to save the Hantucket pilot fee to all the ships 
he was concerned in, for he never piloted any other craft — Bildad, I 
say, might now be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for 
the approaching anchor, and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal 
stave of psalmody, to cheer the hands at the windlass, who roared forth 
some sort of a chorus about the girls in Booble Alley, with hearty 
goodwill, nevertheless, not three days previous, Bildad had told them 
that no profane songs would be allowed on board the Pequod, par- 
ticularly in getting under weigh; and Charity, his sister, had placed 
a small choice copy of Watts in each seaman’s berth. 

Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg ripped 
and swore astern in the most frightful manner. I almost thought he 


93 


THE WHITE WHALE 

would sink the ship before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily I 
paused on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking 
of the perils we both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil 
for a pilot. I was comforting myself, however, with the thought that 
in pious Bildad might he found some salvation, spite of his seven 
hundred and seventy-seventh lay ! when I felt a sudden sharp poke in 
my rear, and turning round, was horrified at the apparition of Captain 
Peleg in the act of withdrawing his leg from my immediate vicinity. 
That was my first kick. 

“Is that the way they heave in the marchant service ?” he roared. 
“Spring, thou sheephead ; spring, and break thy backbone ! Why, don’t 
ye spring, I say, all of ye — spring! Quohog! spring, thou chap with 
the red whiskers; spring there, Scotch-cap; spring, thou green pants. 
Spring, I say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out !” And so saying, 
he moved along the windlass, here and there using his leg very freely, 
while imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody. Thinks 
I, Captain Peleg must have been drinking something to-day. 

At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It 
was a sharp, cold Christmas ; and as the short northern day merged into 
night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose 
freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armour. The long rows of 
teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white 
ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from 
the bows. 

Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as 
the old craft deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering 
frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his 
steady notes were heard, — 

“Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, 

Stand dress’d in living green. 

So to the Jews old Canaan stood, 

While Jordan roll’d between.” 

Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then. 
They were full of hope and fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night 
in the boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there 
was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and 


94 


MOBY DICK; OR 

meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the 
spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer. 

At last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed no 
longer. The stout sail boat that had accompanied us began ranging 
alongside. 

It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were 
affected at this juncture, especially Captain Bildad. For loath to 
depart, yet ; very loath to leave, for good, a ship bound on so long and 
perilous a voyage — beyond both stormy Capes; a ship in which some 
thousands of his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in which 
an old shipmate sailed as captain; a man, almost as old as he, once 
more starting to encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to 
say good-bye to a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him, — 
poor old Bildad lingered long ; paced the deck with anxious strides ; ran 
down into the cabin to speak another farewell word there; again came 
on deck, and looked to windward ; looked towards the wide and endless 
waters, only bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents ; looked 
towards the land; looked aloft; looked right and left; looked every- 
where and nowhere; and at last, mechanically coiling a rope upon its 
pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the hand, and holding -up a 
lantern, for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as much 
as to say, “Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can.” 

As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for 
all his philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the 
lantern came too near. And he, too, did not a little run from cabin 
to deck — now a word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief 
mate. 

But, at last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look about 
him, — “Captain Bildad — come, old shipmate, we must go. Back 
the mainyard there! Boat ahoy! Stand by to come close alongside, 
now! Careful, careful! come, Bildad, boy — say your last. Luck to 
ye, Starbuck — luck to ye, Mr. Stubb — luck to ye, Mr. Flask — good-bye, 
and good luck to ye all — and this day three years I’ll have a hot supper 
smoking for ye in old Nantucket. Hurrah and away !” 

“God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men,” murmured 
old Bildad, almost incoherently. “I hope ye’ll have fine weather now, 
so that Captain Ahab may soon be moving among ye — a pleasant sun 


THE WHITE WHALE 95 

is all he needs, and ye’ll have plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye 
go. Be careful in the hunt, ye mates. Don’t stave the boats need- 
lessly, ye harpooneers ; good white cedar plank is raised full three per 
cent, within the year. Don’t forget your prayers, either. Mr. Star- 
buck, mind that cooper don’t waste the spare staves. Oh ! the sail- 
needles are in the green locker ! Don’t whale it too much a’ Lord’s 
Day, men; but don’t miss a fair chance either, that’s rejecting Heaven’s 
good gifts. Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a 
little leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware 
of fornication. Good-bye, good-bye ! Don’t keep that cheese too 
long down in the hold, Mr. Starhuck; it’ll spoil. Be careful with the 
butter — twenty cents the pound it was, and mind ye, if ” 

“Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering, — away!” and with 
that, Peleg hurried him over the side, and both dropped into the boat. 

Ship and boat diverged ; the cold, damp night-breeze blew between ; 
a screaming gull flew overhead ; the two hulls wildly rolled ; we gave 
three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone 
Atlantic. 


CHAPTER XXIII 

THE LEE SHORE 

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, new-landed 
mariner, encountered in Hew Bedford at the inn.. 

When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vin- 
dictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing 
at her helm hut Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and 
fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four 
years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still 
another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. 
Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable ; deep memories yield 
no epitaphs ; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. 
Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, 
that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain 
give succour ; the port is pitiful ; in the port is safety, comfort, hearth- 
stone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. 


96 


MOBY DICK; OR 

But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy. She 
must fly all hospitality; one touch of land though it but graze the 
keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her 
might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights against the very 
winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s 
landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her 
only friend her bitterest foe ! 

Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that 
mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the 
intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; 
while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on 
the treacherous, slavish shore ? 

But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, in- 
definite as God — so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than 
be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety ! 
For worm-like, then, oh ! who would craven crawl to land ! Ter- 
rors of the terrible ! is all this agony so vain ? Take heart, take 
heart, O Bulkington ! Bear thee grimly, demigod ! Up from 
the spray of thy ocean-perishing — straight up, leaps thy apothe- 
sis ! 


CHAPTER XXIV 

THE ADVOCATE 

As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling ; 
and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded 
among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit ; there- 
fore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice 
hereby done to us hunters of whales: 

In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish 
the fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not 
accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions. If 
a stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society, 
it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were he 
presented to the company as a harpooneer, say ; and if in emulation of 
the naval officers he should append the initials S. W. F. (Sperm Whale 


97 


THE WHITE WHALE 

Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed pre- 
eminently presuming and ridiculous. 

Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honouring us 
whalemen, is this : they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a 
butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, 
we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, 
that is true. But butchers also, and butchers of the bloodiest, badge, 
have been all martial commanders whom the world invariably delights 
to honour. And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our 
business, ye shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty 
generally unknown, and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant 
the sperm whaleship at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy 
earth. But even granting the charge in question to be true, what 
disordered slippery decks of a whale ship are comparable to the un- 
speakable carrion of those battlefields from which so many soldiers 
return to drink in. all ladies’ plaudits ? And if the idea of peril so much 
enhances the popular conceit of the soldier’s profession; let me assure 
ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would 
quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale’s vast tail, fanning 
into eddies the air over his head. For what are the comprehensible 
terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of 
God! 

But, though the world scouts at us whale-hunters, yet does it un- 
wittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adora- 
tion! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that bum round 
the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory ! 

But' look at this matter in other lights ; weigh it in all sorts of scales ; 
see what we whalemen are, and have been. 

Why did the Dutch in De Witt’s time have admirals of their whaling 
fleets? Why did Louis xvi. of France, at his own personal expense, 
fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town 
some score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? 
Why did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whale- 
men in bounties upwards of £1,000,000? And lastly, how comes 
it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the 
banded- whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven 
hundred vessels ; manned by eighteen thousand men ; yearly consuming 


98 


MOBY DICK; OR 

4,000,000 of dollars ; the ships worth, at the time of sailing, 
$20,000,000 ; and every year importing into our harbours a well reaped 
harvest of $7,000,000 ? How comes all this, if there be not something 
puissant in whaling ? 

But this is not the half ; look again. 

I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his 
life, point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last 
sixty years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, 
taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling. 
One way and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in them- 
selves, and so continuously momentous in their sequential issues, that 
whaling may well he regarded as that Egyptian mother who bore off- 
spring themselves pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, 
endless task to catalogue all those things. Let a handful suffice. For 
many years past the whale ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out 
the remotest and least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas 
and archipelagoes which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver 
had ever sailed. If American and European, men-of-war now peace- 
fully ride in once savage harbours, let them fire salutes to the honour 
and the glory of the whale ship, which originally showed them the way, 
and first interpreted between them and the savages. They may cele- 
brate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, 
your Krusensterns ; hut I say that scores of anonymous Captains have 
sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your 
Cook and your Krusenstern. For in their succourless empty-handed- 
ness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of 
unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin wonders and terrors 
that Cook with all his marines and muskets would not willingly have 
dared. All that is made such a flourish of in the old South Sea 
Voyages, those things were hut the lifetime commonplaces of our heroic 
Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates three 
chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the 
ship’s common log. Ah, the world ! Oh, the world ! 

Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but 
colonial, scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between 
Europe and the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the 
Pacific coast. It was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous 


THE WHITE WHALE 


99 


policy of the Spanish Crown, touching those colonies; and, if space 
permitted, it might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at 
last eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the 
yoke of Old Spain, and the establishment of the eternal democracy in 
those parts. 

That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was 
given to the enlightened world by the whalemen. After its first blun- 
der-born discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those 
shores as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale ship touched there. 
The whale ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony. More- 
over, in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the emigrants 
were several times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of 
the whale ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters. The un- 
counted isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do com- 
mercial homage to the whale ship, that cleared the way for the mission- 
ary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive mission- 
aries to their first destinations. If that double-bolted land, Japan, 
is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale ship alone to whom the 
credit will be due ; for already she is on the threshold. 

But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling has no 
sesthetically noble associations connected with it, then am I ready to 
shiver fifty lances with you there, and unhorse you with a split helmet 
every time. 

“The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler,” 
you will say. 

The whale no famous author , and whaling no famous chronicler? 
Who wrote the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty 
Job! And who composed the first narrative of a whaling voyage? 
Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the Great, who, with his own 
royal pen, took down the words from Other, the Norwegian whale- 
hunter of those times ! And who pronounced our glowing eulogy in 
Parliament ? Who, but Edmund Burke ! 

“True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they 
have no good blood in their veins.” 

No good Mood in their veins? They have something better than 
royal blood there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary 
Morrel ; afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old settlers 


100 


MOBY DICK; OR 

of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Eolgers and Har- 
pooneers — all kith and kin to noble Benjamin — this day darting the 
barbed iron from one side of the world to the other. 

“Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not 
respectable.” 

Whaling not respectable ? Whaling is imperial! By old English 
statutory law, the whale is declared “a royal fish.” 1 

“Oh, that’s only nominal! The whale himself has never figured 
in any grand imposing way.” 

The whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In one of 
the mighty triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the 
world’s capital, the hones of a whale brought all the way from the 
Syrian coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed pro- 
cession. 

“Grant it, since you cite it ; but, say what you will, there is no real 
dignity in whaling.” 

No dignity in whaling? The dignity of our calling the very heavens 
attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South ! No more ! Drive down 
your hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg ! no more ! 
I know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty 
whales. I account that man more honourable than that great Captain 
of antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns. 

And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered 
prime thing in me ; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small 
but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious 
of ; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might 
rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my execu- 
tors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, 
then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whal- 
ing; for a whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard. 

CHAPTER XXV 

KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES 

The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, 
and a Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born 

1 See subsequent chapters for something more on this head. 


101 


THE WHITE WHALE 

on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, liis flesh 
being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live 
blood would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some 
time of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for 
which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he 
seen ; those summers had dried up -all his physical superfluousness. 
But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting 
anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. 
It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill- 
looking ; quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit ; 
and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and 
strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to 
endure for long ages to come, and to endure always, as now; for be it 
Polar snow or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality 
was warranted to do well in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you 
seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand fold perils 
he had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man whose 
life for the most part was a telling pantomine of action, and not a tame 
chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there 
were certain qualities in him which at times affected, and in some cases 
seem well-nigh to overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly conscientious 
for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery 
loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition ; 
but to that sort of superstition, which in some organisations seems 
rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. 
Outward portents and inward presentiments were his. And if at times 
these things bent the welded iron of his soul, much more did his far- 
away domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend 
him still more from the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him 
still further to those latent influences which, in some honest-hearted 
men, restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others 
in the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. “I will have no man 
in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.” By this, 
he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage 
was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, 
but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a 
coward. 


102 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“Ay, ay,” said Stubb, the second mate, “Starbuck, there, is as careful 
a man as you’ll find anywhere in this fishery.” But we shall ere long 
see what that word “careful” precisely means when used by a man like 
Stubb, or almost any other whale-hunter. 

Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a 
sentiment ; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon 
all mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in 
this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits of 
the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted. 
Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sundown; 
nor for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting 
him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill 
whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs ; and that 
hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew. What doom 
was his own father’s ? Where, in the bottomless deeps, could he find 
the torn limbs of his brother ? 

With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain 
superstitiousness, as has been said, the courage of this Starbuck which 
could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been extreme. But 
it was not in reasonable nature that a man so organised, and with such 
terrible experiences and remembrances as he had ; it was not in nature 
that these things should fail in latently engendering an element in him, 
which, under suitable circumstances, would break out from its confine- 
ment, and burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it was 
that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which, while 
generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, 
or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot with- 
stand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which some- 
times menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and 
mighty man. 

But were the coming narrative to reveal, in any instance, the com- 
plete abasement of poor Starbuck’s fortitude, scarce might I have the 
heart to write it ; for it is a thing most sorrowful ; nay shocking, to ex- 
pose the fall of valour in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint- 
stock companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may 
be ; men may have mean and meagre faces ; hut man, in the ideal, is so 
noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over 


THE WHITE WHALE 103 

any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their 
costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves 

so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character 
seem gone — bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of 
a valour-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, 
completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But 
this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but 
that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt 
see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that 
democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God 
Himself ! 

If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall 
hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark ; weave round them tragic 
graces ; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among 
them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall 
touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light ; if I shall spread a 
rainbow over his disastrous set of sun ; then against all mortal critics 
bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which has spread one 
royal mantle of humanity over all my kind ! Bear me out in it, thou 
great democratic God ! who - didst not refuse to the swart convict, 
Runyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly 
hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old 
Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; 
who didst hurl him upon a warhorse; who didst thunder him higher 
than a throne ! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever 
cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me 
out in it, O God ! 


CHAPTER XXVI 

KNIGHTS AND SQUIREiS 

Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod ; and hence, 
according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go- 
lucky ; neither craven nor valiant, taking perils as they came with an 
indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crises of the 
chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged 


104 


MOBY DICK; OR 

for the year. Good-humoured, easy, and careless, he presided over his 
whale boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his 
crew all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable 
arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the 
snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very death-lock 
of the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as a 
whistling tinker his hammer* He would hum over his old rigadig 
tunes while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster. Long 
usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy-chair. 
What he thought of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever 
thought of it at all, might he a question ; hut, if he ever did chance to 
cast his mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good 
sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and 
bestir themselves there, about something which he would find out when 
he obeyed the order, and not sooner. 

What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going, un- 
fearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a 
world full of grave pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their packs ; 
what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humour of his — 
that thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black 
little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You would 
almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his 
nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready 
loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and, whenever, 
he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one from 
the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them again to he in 
readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his 
legs into his trousers, he put his pipe into his mouth. 

I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of 
his peculiar disposition ; for every one knows that this earthly air, 
whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries 
of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it ; and as in time of 
the cholera, some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to 
their mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb’s 
tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent. 

The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha’s Vine- 
yard; a short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning 


THE WHITE WHALE 105 

whales, who somehow seemed to think that the great leviathans had 
personally and hereditarily affronted him ; and, therefore, it was a sort 
of point of honour with him, to destroy them whenever encountered. 
So utterly lost was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of 
their majestic hulk and mystic ways ; and so dead to anything like an 
apprehension of any possible danger from encountering them, that in 
his poor opinion, the wondrous whale was hut a species of magnified 
mouse, or at least water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention and 
some small application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil. 
This ignorant unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little waggish 
in the matter of whales ; he followed these fish for the fun of it ; and a 
three years’ voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted 
that length of time. As a carpenter’s nails are divided into wrought 
nails and cut nails ; so mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask 
was one of the wrought ones ; made to clinch tight and last long. They 
called him King-Post on board of the Pequod ; because in form he could 
be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in Arctic 
whalers ; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers in- 
serted into it, serves to brace the ship against the icy concussions of 
those battering seas. 

How these three mates — Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momen- 
tous men. They it was who by universal prescription commanded three 
of the Pequod’ s boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in 
which Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on 
the whales, these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, 
being armed with their long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked 
trio of lancers; even as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins. 

And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a 
Gothic Knight of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or har- 
pooneer, who in certain conjunctures provides him with a fresh lance, 
when the former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the assault ; 
and moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a close 
intimacy and friendliness ; it is therefore but meet, that in this place 
we set down who the Pequod’ s harpooneers were, and to what headsman 
each of them belonged. 

First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had 
selected for his squire. But Queequeg is already known. 


106 


MOBY DICK; OR 

Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most 
westerly promontory of Martha’s Vineyard, where there still exists the 
last remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the 
neighbouring island of Nantucket with many of her most daring har- 
pooneers. In the fishery, they usually go by the generic name of Gay- 
Headers. Tashtego’s long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek hones, and 
black rounding eyes — for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness, hut 
Antarctic in their glittering expression — all this sufficiently proclaimed 
him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those proud warrior hunters, 
who, in quest of the great New England moose, had scoured, how in 
hand, the aboriginal forest of the main. But no longer snuffing in the 
trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the 
wake of the great whales of the sea ; the unerring harpoon of the son 
fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires. To look at the tawny 
brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have credited the 
superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and half believed this 
wild Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. Tash- 
tego was Stubb the second mate’s squire. 

Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black 
negro-savage, with a lion-like tread — an Ahasuerus to behold. Sus- 
pended from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors 
called them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the topsail halyards 
to them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of 
a whaler, lying in a lonely bay on his native coast. And never having 
been anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan 
harbours most frequented by whalemen ; and having now led for many 
years the bold life of the fishery in ships of owners uncommonly heed- 
ful of what manner of men they shipped ; Daggoo retained all his bar- 
baric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the 
pomp of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in 
looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a 
white flag come to beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial 
negro, Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the squire of little Flask, who looked 
like a chess-man beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod’s com- 
pany, be it said, that at the present day not one in two of the many 
thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale-fishery, 
are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein 


THE WHITE WHALE 107 

it is the same with the American whale-fishery as with the American 
army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces 
employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads— 
the same, I say, because in all these cases the native American liberally 
provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the 
muscles. No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the 
Azores, where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch 
to augment their crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. 
In like manner, the Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, 
put in at the Shetland Islands, to receive the full complement of their 
crew. Upon the passage homewards, they drop them there again. 
How it is, there is no telling, hut Islanders seem to make the best 
whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in the Peqaod Isolatos too, 
I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each 
Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated 
along one keel, what a set these Isolatos were ! An Anacharsis Clootz 
deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, 
accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world’s grievances 
before that bar from which not very many of them ever come back. 
Black Little Pip — he never did! Poor Alabama boy! On the grim 
Pequod’ s forecastle, ye shall ere long see him, beating his tambourine ; 
prelusive of the eternal time, when, sent for to the great quarter-deck 
on high, he was hid strike in with angels, and beat his tambourine 
in glory ; called a coward here, hailed a hero there ! 

CHAPTER, XXVII 
ahab 

For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was 
seen of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other at 
the watches, and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they 
seemed to be the only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes 
issued from the cabin with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after 
all it was plain they but commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme 
lord and dictator was there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not 
permitted to penetrate into the now sacred retreat of the cabin. 


108 


MOBY DICK; OR 

Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I in- 
stantly gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible ; for my first 
vague disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion 
of the sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely height- 
ened at times by the ragged Elijah’s diabolical incoherences unin- 
vitedly recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before 
conceived of. But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other 
moods I was almost ready to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that 
outlandish prophet of the wharves. But whatever it was of appre- 
hensiveness or uneasiness — to call it so — which I felt, yet whenever I 
came to look about me in the ship, it seemed against all warrantry to 
cherish such emotions. Eor though the harpooneers, with the great 
body of the crew, were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set 
than any of the tame merchant ship companies which my previous 
experiences had made me acquainted with, still I ascribed this — and 
rightly ascribed it— to the fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that 
wild Scandinavian vocation in which I had so ahandonedly embarked. 
But it was especially the aspect of the three chief officers of the ship, 
the mates, which was most forcibly calculated to allay these colourless 
misgivings, and induce confidence and cheerfulness in every presentment 
of the voyage. Three better, more like sea-officers and men, each in 
his own different way, could not readily he found, and they were every 
one of them Americans; a Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man. 
Now, it being Christmas when the ship shot from out her harbour, for 
a space we had biting polar weather, though all the time running away 
from it to the southward ; and by every degree and minute of latitude 
which we sailed, gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its 
intolerable weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but 
still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with 
a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive 
sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the 
deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled my glance 
towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me. Eeality outran 
apprehensions ; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck. 

There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the 
recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, 
when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming 


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© Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. 

FOREBODING SHIVERS RAN OVER ME. REALITY OUTRAN APPREHENSIONS; CAPTAIN AHAB 
STOOD UPON HIS QUARTER-DECK. 


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THE WHITE WHALE 

them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robust- 
ness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and 
shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus. Thread- 
ing its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down 
one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his 
clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It re- 
sembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty 
trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down 
it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the 
bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree 
still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with 
him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one 
could certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage 
little or no allusion was made to it, especially by the mates. But once 
Tashtego’s senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew, super- 
stitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years old did Ahab 
become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the fury 
of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild 
hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinu- 
ated, an old sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed out of 
Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, 
the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested 
this old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that 
no white sailor seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever 
Captain Ahab should be tranquilly laid out — which might hardly come 
to pass, so he muttered — then, whoever should do that last office for the 
dead, would find a birthmark on him from crown to sole. 

So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the 
livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly 
noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the 
barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously 
come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the 
polished bone of the sperm whale’s jaw. “Ay, he was dismasted off 
Japan,” said the old Gay-Head Indian once; “but like his dismasted 
craft, he shipped another mast without coming home for it. He has 
a quiver of ’em.” 

I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each 


110 


MOBY DICK; OR 

side of the Pequoct’s quarter-deck, and pretty close to the mizzen 
shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into 
the plank. His hone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and 
holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out. 
beyond the ship’s ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest 
fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and 
fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke ; nor 
did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest ges- 
tures and expressions-, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, 
consciousness of being under . a troubled master-eye. And not only 
that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with an apparently 
eternal anguish in his face ; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity 
of some mighty woe. 

Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. 
But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either 
standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or 
heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy ; indeed, began 
to grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as if, 
when the ship had sailed from home, nothing hut the dead wintry 
bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, 
it came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air ; but, as yet, 
for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck, he 
seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the Pequod was 
only making a passage now ; not regularly cruising ; nearly all whaling 
preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, 
so that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite 
Ahab, now ; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that 
layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose 
the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon. 

Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the 
present, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him 
from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April 
and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods ; even the barest, 
ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some 
few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants ; so Ahab did, 
in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish 


Ill 


THE WHITE WHALE 

air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a 
look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out 
in a smile. 


CHAPTEK XXVIII 

ENTER AHAB J TO HIM, STUBB 

Some 1 days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now 
went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost per- 
petually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic. 
The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, 
were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up, flaked up, with 
rose water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty 
dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory 
of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For 
sleeping man, ’twas hard to choose between such winsome days and 
such seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather 
did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. 
Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours 
of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most 
forms of noiseless twilights. And all these subtle agencies, more and 
more they wrought on Ahab’s texture. 

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the 
less man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-com- 
manders, the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit 
the night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, 
he seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits 
were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. “It feels 
like going down into one’s tomb,” — he would mutter to himself, — “for 
an old captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my 
grave-dug berth.” 

So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night 
were set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band 
below; and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the 
sailors flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cau- 
tiousness dropt it to its place, for fear of disturbing their slumber- 
ing shipmates; when this sort of steady quietude would begin to 




112 


MOBY DICK; OR 

prevail, habitually, the silent steersman would watch the cabin- 
scuttle; and ere long the old man would emerge, gripping at the iron 
banister, to help his crippled way. Some considerating touch of 
humanity was in him ; for at times like these, he usually abstained from 
patrolling the quarter deck; because to his wearied mates, seeking re- 
pose within six inches of his ivory heel, such would have been the 
reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their dreams would 
have been of the crunching teeth of sharks. But once, the mood was 
on him too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy, lumber- 
like pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, 
the odd second mate came up from below, and with a certain unassured, 
deprecating humorousness, hinted that if Captain Ahab was pleased 
to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay; hut there might be 
some way of muffling the noise; hinting something indistinctly and 
hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion into it, of the 
ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab then. 

“Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb,” said Ahab, “that thou wouldst wad 
me that fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy 
nightly grave ; where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the 
filling one at last — Down, dog, and kennel !” 

Starting at the unforeseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly 
scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly, 
“I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir ; I do but less than half 
like it, sir.” 

“Avast!” gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving 
away, as if to avoid some passionate temptation. 

“No, sir; not yet,” said Stubb, emboldened; “I will not tamely 
be called a dog, sir.” 

“Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and 
begone, or I’ll clear the world of thee !” 

As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing ter- 
rors in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated. 

“I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,” 
muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin scuttle. “It’s 
very queer. Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don’t well know whether 
to go back and strike him, or — what’s that ? — down here on my knees 
and pray for him ? Yes, that was the thought coming up in me ; but 


THE WHITE WHALE n* 

it would be the first time I ever did pray. It’s queer ; very queer ; and 
lie’s queer too; ay, take him fore and aft, he’s about the queerest old 
man Stubb ever sailed with. How he flashed at me! — his eyes like 
powder-pans ! is he mad ? Anyway there’s something on his mind, as 
sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks. He ain’t in 
his bed now, either, more than three hours out of the twenty-four; 
and he don’t sleep then. Didn’t that Dough-Boy, the steward, tell 
me that of a morning he always finds the old man’s hammock clothes 
all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot, and the 
coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort of frightful hot, 
as though a baked brick had been on it ? A hot old man ! I guess he’s 
got what some folks ashore call a conscience; it’s a kind of Tic-dolly- 
row they say — worse nor a toothache. Well, well ; I don’t know what it 
is, but the Lord keep me from catching it. He’s full of riddles; I 
wonder what he goes into the after-hold for, every night, as Dough- 
Boy tells me he suspects; what’s that for, I should like to know? 
Who’s made appointments with him in the hold? Ain’t that queer, 
now? But there’s no telling, it’s the old game — Here goes for a 
snooze. Damn me, it’s worth a fellow’s while to be born into the 
world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think of it, that’s 
about the first thing babies do, and that’s a sort of queer, too. Damn 
me, but all things are queer, come to think of ’em. But that’s against 
my principles. Think not is my eleventh commandment; and sleep 
when you can, is my twelfth — So here goes again. But how’s that? 
didn’t he call me a dog? blazes! he called me ten times a donkey, 
and piled a lot of jackasses on top of that! He might as well have 
kicked me, and done with it. Maybe he did kick me, and I didn’t 
observe it, I was so taken aback with his brow, somehow. It flashed 
like a bleached bone. What the devil’s the matter with me ? I don’t 
stand right on my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of 
turned me wrong side out. By the Lord, I must have been dream- 
ing, though — How? how? how? — but the only way’s to stash it; so 
here goes to hammock again; and in the morning, I’ll see how this 
•plaguy juggling thinks over by daylight.” 


114 


MOBY DICK; OR 


CHAPTEE XXIX 

THE PIPE 

When* Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the 
bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a 
sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his 
pipe. Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool 
on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked. 

In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were 
fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhal. How could 
one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethink- 
ing him of the royalty it symbolised ? Eor a khan of the plank, and 
a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab. 

Some moments passed, during which the thick vapour came from 
his mouth in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his 
face. “How now,” he soliloquised at last, withdrawing the tube, 
“this smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe ! hard must it go with 
me if thy charm be gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, 
not pleasuring, — aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the 
while ; to windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying 
whale, my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What 
business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for serene- 
ness, to send up mild white vapours among mild white hairs, not among 

torn iron-grey locks like mine. I’ll smoke no more ” 

He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the 
waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe 
made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks. 


CHAPTEE XXX 

QUEEN" MAB 

Next morning Stubb accosted Flask. 

“Such a queer dream, King-post, I never had. You know the old 
man’s ivory leg, well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I 


115 


THE WHITE WHALE 

tried to kick back, upon my soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right 
off! And then, presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blaz- 
ing fool, kept kicking at it. But what was still more curious, Flask — 
you know how curious all dreams are — through all this rage that I was 
in, I somehow seemed to be thinking to myself, that after all, it was 
not much of an insult, that kick from Ahab. AVhy/ thinks I, 'what’s 
the row ? It’s not a real leg, only a false leg.’ And there’s a mighty 
difference between a living thump and a dead thump. That’s what 
makes a blow from the hand, Flask, fifty times more savage to bear 
than a blow from a cane. The living member — that makes the living 
insult, my little man. And thinks I to myself all the while, mind, 
while I was stubbing my silly toes against that cursed pyramid — so 
confoundedly contradictory was it all, all the while, I say, I was 
thinking to myself, 'what’s his leg now, but a cane — a whalebone 
cane. Yes,’ thinks I, 'it was only a playful cudgelling — in fact, only 
a whaleboning that he gave me — not a base kick. Besides,’ thinks I, 
'look at it once; why, the end of it — the foot part — what a small sort 
of end it is; whereas, if a broad-footed farmer kicked me, there s a 
devilish broad insult. But this insult is whittled down to a point only.’ 
But now comes the greatest joke of the dream, Flask. While I was 
battering away at the pyramid, a sort of badger-haired old merman, 
with a hump on his back, takes me by the shoulders, and slews me 
round. 'What are you ’bout ?’ says he. Slid ! man, but I was fright- 
ened. Such a phiz ! But, somehow, next moment I was over the 
fright. 'What am I about V says I at last. 'And what business is that 
of yours, I should like to know, Mr. Humpback ? Do you want a kick V 
By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned round 
his stem to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed he had for a 
clout — what do you think I saw? — why thunder alive, man, his stern 
was stuck full of marlinspikes, with the points out. Says I, on second 
thoughts. 'I guess I won’t kick you, old fellow.’ 'Wise Stubb,’ said 
he, 'wise Stubb’ ; and kept muttering it all the time, a sort of eating of 
his own gums like a chimney hag. Seeing he wasn’t going to stop say- 
ing over his 'wise Stubb, wise Stubb’ I thought I might as well fall to 
kicking the pyramid again. But I had only just lifted my foot for it, 
when he roared out, 'Stop that kicking!’ 'Halloa,’ says I, 'what’s 
the matter now, old fellow ?’ 'Look ye here,’ says he ; 'let’s argue the 


116 


MOBY DICK; OR 

insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn’t be?’ ‘Yes, be did,’ says I — 
‘right here it was.’ ‘Very good,’ says be — ‘be used bis ivory leg, didn’t 
be ?’ ‘Yes, be did,’ says I. ‘Well then,’ says be, ‘wise Stubb, what have 
you to complain of? Didn’t be kick with right good will? it wasn’t 
a common pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it? No, you were kicked 
by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It’s an honour ; 
I consider it an honour. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England the 
greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made 
garter-knights of; but, be your boast, Stubb, that, ye were kicked by 
old Ahab, and made a wise man of. Remember what I say; he 
kicked by him; account his kicks honours; and on no account kick 
back; for you can’t help yourself, wise Stubb. Don’t you see that 
pyramid? With that, he all of a sudden seemed somehow, in some 
queer fashion, to swim off into the air. I snored; rolled over; and 
there I was in my hammock! Now, what do you think of that dream, 
Flask?” 

“I don’t know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho’.” 

“May be ; may be. But it’s made a wise man of me, Flask. D’ye 
see Ahab standing there, sideways looking over stem? Well, the best 
thing you can do, Flask, is to let that old man alone ; never speak to 
him, whatever he says. Halloa ! What’s that he shouts ? Hark !” 

“Masthead, there! Look sharp, all of ye! there are whales here- 
abouts ! If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him !” 

“What d’ye think of that now, Flask? ain’t there a small drop of 
something queer about that, eh ? A white whale — did ye mark that, 
man ? Look ye — there’s something special in the wind. Stand by for 
it, Flask. Ahab has that that’s bloody on his mind. But, mum; he 
comes this way.” 


CHAPTER XXXI 

CETOLOGY 

Ai.ready we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be 
lost in its unshored, harbourless immensities. Ere that come to pass ; 
ere the Pequod’s weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls 


THE WHITE WHALE m 

of the leviathan; at the outset it is hut well to attend to a matter 
almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the 
more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which 
are to follow. 

It is some systematised exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, 
that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The 
classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed. 
Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down. 

“No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled 
Cotology,” says Captain Scoreshy, a. d. 1820. 

“It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the in- 
quiry as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and 
families. . . . Utter confusion exists among the historians of this 
animal” (sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale. a.d. 1839. 

“Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters.” 
“Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea.” “A field 
strewn with thorns.” “All these incomplete indications but serve to 
torture us naturalists.” 

Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and 
Lesson, those lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of 
real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are plenty; and so 
in some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales. Many 
are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who 
have at large or in little, written of the whale. Bun over a few: — 
The Authors of the Bible ; Aristotle ; Pliny ; Aldrovandi ; Sir Thomas 
Browne; Gesner; Kay; Linnseus; Kondeletius; Willoughby Green; 
Artedi; Sibhald; Brisson; Marten; Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest; 
Baron Cuvier; Frederic Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoreshy; 
Beale; Bennett; J. Boss Brown; the Author of Miriam Coffin; Olm- 
stead; and the Kev. T. Cheever. But to what ultimate generalising 
purpose all these have written, the above cited extracts will show. 

Of the names on this list of whale authors, only those following Owen 
ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional 
harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoreshy. On the sep- 
arate subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing 
authority. But Scoreshy knew nothing and says nothing of the great 
sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale is almost 


118 


MOBY DICK; OR 

unworthy mentioning. And here he it said, that the Greenland whale 
is an usurper upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means 
the largest of the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of his 
claims, and the profound ignorance which, till some seventy years back, 
invested the then fabulous or utterly unknown sperm whale, and which 
ignorance to this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific 
retreats and whale ports ; this usurpation has been every way complete. 
Reference to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of 
past days, will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, 
was to them the monarch of the seas. But the time has at last come 
for a new proclamation. This is Charing Cross ; hear ye ! good people 
all, — the Greenland whale is deposed, — the great sperm whale now 
reigneth ! 

There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the 
living sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest 
degree succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beale’s and Bennett’s ; 
both in their time surgeons to English South Sea whale ships, and both 
exact and reliable men. The original matter touching the sperm whale 
to be found in their volumes is necessarily small, but so far as it goes, 
it is of excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific description. 
As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not com- 
plete in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an 
unwritten life. 

Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular com- 
prehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for the present, 
hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent labourers. 
As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon 
offer my own poor endeavours. I promise nothing complete; because 
any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason 
infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical de- 
scription of the various species, or — in this place at least — to much 
of any systematisation of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder. 

But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post 
Office is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea after 
them; to have one’s hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, 
and very pelvis of the world ; this is a fearful thing. What am I that 
I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan ! The awful taunt- 


119 


THE WHITE WHALE 

ings in Job might well appal me. “Will he (the leviathan) make a 
covenant with thee ? Behold the hope of him is vain !” But I 
have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to 
do with whales with these visible hands ; I am in earnest ; and I will 
try. There are some preliminaries to settle. 

First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology 
is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it 
still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System 
of Nature, a. d. 1776, Linnaeus declares, “I hereby separate the whales 
from the fish.” But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the 
year 1850, sharks and shads, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus’s 
express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas 
with the Leviathan. 

The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the 
whales from the waters, he states as follows : “On account of their 
warm bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow 
ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,” and finally, “ex 
lege naturae jure meritoque.” I submitted all this to my friends 
Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of 
mine in a certain voyage and they united in the opinion that the 
reasons set forth were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted 
they were humbug. 

Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old-fashioned 
ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me. 
This fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what internal 
respect does the whale differ from other fish l Above, Linnaeus has 
given you those items. But in brief, they are these : lungs and warm 
blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold-blooded. 

Next : how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as 
conspicuously to label him for all time to come ? To be short, then, a 
whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail. There you have him. 
However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded medi- 
tation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a 
fish, because he is amphibious. But the last term of the definition is 
still more cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost any one must have 
noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a 


120 


MOBY DICK; OR 

vertical, or up and down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail, 
though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes* a horizontal 
position. 

By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude 
from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified 
with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers ; nor, on the other 
hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as alien . 1 
Hence all the smaller, spouting, and horizontal tailed fish must be in- 
cluded in this ground-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come the grand 
divisions of the entire whale host. 

First : According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary 
BOOKS (subdivisible into Chapters), and these shall comprehend 
them all, both small and large. 

I. The Folio Whale; II. the Octavo Whale; III. the Duo- 
decimo Whale. 

As the type of the Folio I present the Sperm Whale ; of the Octavo, 
the Grampus ; of the Duodecimo, the Porpoise. 

FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters: — I. 
The Sperm Whale; II. the Right Whale; III. the Fin-Back Whale; 
IV. the Kumprbacked Whale; V. the Razor-Back Whale; VI. the 
Sulphur-Bottom Whale. 

BOOK I. ( Folio ), Chapter I. ( Sperm Whale ). — This whale, 
among the English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and 
the Physeter whale, and the Anvil-Headed whale, is the present Cacha- 
lot of the French and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Mac- 
rocephalus of the Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest 
inhabitant of the globe ; the most formidable of all whales to encounter ; 
the most majestic in aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in 
commerce; he being the only creature from which that valuable sub- 
stance, spermaceti, is obtained. All his peculiarities will, in many 
other places, be enlarged upon. It is chiefly with his name that I now 

1 1 am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and 
Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included by 
many naturalists among the whales. But as these pig-fish are a noisy, con- 
temptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet 
hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials as whales; 
and have presented them with their passports to quit the Kingdom of 
Cetology. 


121 


THE WHITE WHALE 

have to do. Philologically considered, it is absurd. Some centuries 
ago, when the Sperm whale was almost wholly unknown in his own 
proper individuality, and when his oil was only accidentally obtained 
from the stranded fish; in those days spermaceti, it would seem, was 
popularly supposed to be derived from a creature identical with the 
one then known in England as the Greenland or Eight Whale. It was 
the idea also that this same spermaceti was that quickening humour of 
the Greenland Whale which the first syllable of the word literally ex- 
presses. In those times, also, spermaceti was exceedingly scarce, not 
being used for light, but only as an ointment and medicament. It was 
only to be had from druggists as you nowadays buy an ounce of rhubarb. 
When, as I opine, in the course of time, the true nature of spermaceti 
became known, its original name was still retained by the dealers ; no 
doubt to enhance its value by a notion so strangely significant of its 
scarcity. And so the appellation must at last have come to be bestowed 
upon the whale from which this spermaceti was really derived. 

BOOK I. (. Folio ), Chapter II. ( Right Whale ). — In one respect this 
is the most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly 
hunted by man. It yields the article commonly known as whalebone 
or baleen; and the oil specially known as “whale oil,” an inferior article 
in commerce. Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated 
by all the following titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the 
Black Whale; the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Bight Whale. 
There is a deal of obscurity concerning the identity of the species thus 
multitudinously baptized. What then is the whale, which I include 
in the second species of my F olios ? It is the Great Mysticetus of the 
English naturalists; the Greenland Whale of the English whalemen; 
the Baliene Ordinaire of the French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish 
of the Swedes. It is- the whale which for more than two centuries past 
has been hunted by the Dutch and English in the Arctic seas ; it is the 
whale which the American fishermen have long pursued in the Indian 
Ocean, on the Brazil Banks, on the Nor’-West Coast, and various other 
parts of the world, designated by them Bight Whale Cruising Grounds. 

Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of 
the English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely 
agree in all their grand features; nor ha*s there yet been presented a 


122 


MOBY DICK; OR 

single determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. 
It is by endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differ- 
ences, that some departments of natural history become so repellingly 
intricate. The right whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, 
with reference to elucidating the sperm whale. 

BOOK I. ( Folio ), Chapter III. (Fin-Back ) . — Under this head I 
reckon a monster which, by the various names of Fin-Back, Tail-Spout, 
and Long- John, has been seen almost in every sea and is commonly the 
whale whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the 
Atlantic, in the New York packet tracks. In the length he attains, and 
in his baleen, the Fin-Back resembles the right whale, but is of a less 
portly girth, and a lighter colour, approaching to olive. His great lips 
present a cable-like aspect, formed by the intertwisting, slanting folds 
of large wrinkles. His grand distinguishing feature, the fin, from 
which he derives his name, is often a conspicuous object. This fin is 
some three or four feet long, growing vertically from the hinder part 
of the back, of an angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed end. 
Even if not the slightest other part of the creature be visible, this isolated 
fin will, at times be seen plainly projecting from the surface. When 
the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples, 
and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled 
surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it 
somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hour-lines graved 
on it. On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back. The Fin-Back 
is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. 
Very shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in 
the remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet 
rising like a tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plain ; gifted with 
such wondrous power and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present 
pursuit from man ; this leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable 
Cain of his race, bearing for his mark, that style upon his back. From 
having the baleen in his mouth, the Fin-Back is sometimes included 
with the right whale, among a theoretic species denominated Whalebone 
Whales , that is, whales with baleen. Of these so-called Whalebone 
whales, there would seem to be several varieties, most of which, how- 
ever, are little known. Broad-nosed whales and beaked whales; pike- 


THE WHITE WHALE 123 

headed whales, bunched whales; under-jawed whales and rostrated 
whales, are the fisherman’s names for a few sorts. 

In connection with this appellative of “Whalebone whales,” it is 
of great importance to mention, that however such a nomenclature may 
be convenient in facilitating allusions to some kinds of whales, yet it is 
in vain to attempt a clear classification of the leviathan, founded upon 
either his baleen, or hump, or fin, or teeth ; notwithstanding that those 
marked parts or features very obviously seem better adapted to afford 
the basis for a regular system of Cetology than any other detached 
bodily distinctions, which the whale, in his kinds, presents. How then ? 
The baleen, hump, back-fin, and teeth ; these are things whose peculiar- 
ities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales, without 
any regard to what may be the nature of their structure in other and 
more essential particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and the hump- 
backed whale, each has a hump ; but there the similitude ceases. Then, 
this same humpbacked whale and the Greenland whale, each of these 
has baleen; but there again the similitude ceases. And it is just the 
same with the other parts above-mentioned. In various sorts of whales, 
they form such irregular combinations; or, in the case of any one of 
them detached, such an irregular isolation ; as utterly to defy all general 
methodisation formed upon such a basis. On this rock every one of the 
whale naturalists has split. 

But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the 
whale, in his anatomy — there, at least, we shall be able to hit the right 
classification. Hay; what thing, for example, is there in the Green- 
land whale’s anatomy more striking than his baleen? Yet we have 
seen that by his baleen it is impossible correctly to classify the Green- 
land whale. And if you descend into the bowels of the various levia- 
thans, why, there you will not find distinctions of a fiftieth part as 
available to the systematiser as those external ones already enumerated. 
What then remains ? nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily, in 
their entire liberal volume, and boldly sort them that way. And this 
is the bibliograpical system here adopted ; and it is the only one that 
can possibly succeed, for it alone is practicable. To proceed. 

BOOK I. (Folio), Chapter IV. (Hump-Bach ) . — This whale is often 
seen on the northern American coast. He has been frequently captured 


124 


MOBY DICK; OR 

there, and towed into harbour. He has a great pack on him like a 
pedlar ; or you might call him the Elephant and Castle whale. At any 
rate, the popular name for him does not sufficiently distinguish him, 
since the sperm whale also has a hump, though a smaller one. His oil 
is not very valuable. He has baleen. He is the most gamesome and 
light-hearted of all the whales, making more gay foam and white water 
generally than any other of them. 

BOOK I. (Folio), Chapter V. (Razor-Back) . — Of this whale little 
is known but his name. I have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn. 
Of a retiring nature, he eludes both hunters and philosophers. Though 
no coward, he has never yet shown any part of him but his back, which 
rises in a long sharp ridge. Let him go. I know little more of him, 
nor does anybody else. 

BOOK I. (Folio), Chapter YI. (Sulphur-Bottom). — Another retir- 
ing gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along 
the Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is seldom 
seen; at least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern 
seas, and then always at too great a distance to study his countenance. 
He is never chased ; he would run away with rope-walks of line. Prodi- 
gies are told of him. Adieu, Sulphur-Bottom! I can say nothing 
more that is true of ye, nor can the oldest Hantucketer. 

Thus ends BOOK I. (Folio), and now begins BOOK II. (Octavo). 

OCTAVOES . 1 These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, 
among which at present may be numbered : — I., the Grampus; II., the 
Black Fish ; III., the Narwhal ; IV., the Thrasher ; V., the Killer . 

BOOK II. (Octavo), Chapter I. (Grampus). — Though this fish, 
whose loud sonorous breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a 
proverb to landsmen, is so well-known a denizen of the deep, yet is he 
not popularly classed among whales ; but possessing all the grand dis- 
tinctive features of the leviathan, most naturalists have recognised him 
for one. He is of moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen to twenty- 
five feet in length, and of corresponding dimensions round the waist. 

1 Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain. 
Because, while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of the 
former order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them in figure, 
yet the bookbinder’s Quarto volume in its diminished form does not preserve 
the shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume does. 


THE WHITE WHALE 


125 


He swims in herds; he is never regularly hunted, though his oil is 
considerable in quantity, and pretty good for light. By some fishermen 
his approach is regarded as premonitory of the advance of the great 
sperm whale. 

BOOK II. {Octavo), Chapter II. (Black Fish ). — I give the popu- 
lar fisherman’s names for all these fish, for generally they are the best. 
Where any name happens to be vague or inexpressive, I shall say so, 
and suggest another. I do so now, touching the Black Kish, so called, 
because blackness is the rule among almost all whales. So, call him the 
Hyena Whale, if you please. His voracity is well known, and from 
the circumstances that the inner angles of his lips are curved upwards, 
he carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face. This whale 
averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length. He is found in almost 
all latitudes. He has a peculiar way of showing his dorsal hooked fin 
in swimming, which looks something like a Roman nose. When not 
more profitably employed, the sperm whale hunters sometimes capture 
the Hyena whale, to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domestic 
employment — as some frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, 
and quite alone by themselves, burn unsavoury tallow instead of odorous 
wax. Though their blubber is very thin, some of these whales will yield 
you upwards of thirty gallons of oil. 

BOOK II. (Octavo), Chapter III. (Narwhal), that is, Nostril 
whale . — Another instance of a curiously named whale, so named I sup- 
pose from his peculiar horn being originally mistaken for a peaked nose. 
The creature is some sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages five 
feet, though some exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet. Strictly 
speaking, this horn is but a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw 
in a line a little depressed from the horizontal. But it is only found 
on the sinister side, which has an ill effect, giving its owner something 
analogous to the aspect of a clumsy left-handed man. What precise 
purpose this ivory horn or lance answers, it would be hard to say. It 
does not seem to be used like the blade of the sword-fish and bill-fish ; 
though some sailors tell me that the Harwhal employs it for a rake in 
turning over the bottom of the sea for food. Charley Coffin said it was 
used for an ice-piercer; for the Harwhal, rising to the surface of the 
Polar Sea, and finding it sheeted with ice, thrusts his horn up, and so 


126 


MOBY DICK; OR 

breaks through. But you cannot prove either of these surmises to be 
correct. My own opinion is, that however this one-sided horn may really 
be used by the Narwhal — however that may be — it would certainly be 
very convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets. The Nar- 
whal I have heard called the Tusk whale, the Homed whale, and the 
Unicom whale. He is certainly a curious example of the Unicornism 
to be found in almost every kingdom of animated nature. F rom certain 
cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same sea-unicorn’s horn 
was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote against poison, and 
as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It was also dis- 
tilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the horns 
of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it was 
in itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells me 
that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when Queen 
Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window of 
Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship sailed down the Thames; “when 
Sir Martin returned from that voyage,” saith Black Letter, “on bended 
knees he presented to her highness a prodigious long horn of the Nar- 
whal, which for a long period after hung in the castle at Windsor.” An 
Irish author avers that the Earl of Leicester, on bended knees, did like- 
wise present to her highness another horn, pertaining to a land beast of 
the unicorn nature. 

The Narwhal has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a 
milk-white ground colour, dotted with round and oblong spots of black. 
His oil is very superior, clear, and fine ; but there is little of it, and he 
is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas. 

BOOK II. {Octavo), Chaptee IV. {Killer ). — Of this whale little 
is precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the pro- 
fessed naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should 
say that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savage — a 
sort of Feejee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the 
lip, and hangs there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to 
death. The Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he 
has. Exceptions might be taken to the name bestowed upon this 
whale, on the ground of its indistinctness. For we are all killers, on 
land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included. 


THE WHITE WHALE 127 

BOOK II. (Octavo), Chapter V. (Thresher ). — This gentleman 
is famous for his tail, which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes, 
lie mounts the Folio whale’s hack, and as he swims, he works his 
passage by flogging him ; as some schoolmasters get along in the world 
by a similar process. Still less is known of the Thrasher than of the 
Killer. Both are outlaws, even in the lawless seas. 

Thus ends BOOK II. (Octavo), and begins BOOK III. 
(Duodecimo) . 

DUODECIMOES. — These include the smaller whales. I. The 
Huzza Porpoise. II. The Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealy- 
mouthed Porpoise. 

To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it may 
possibly seem strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding four or five 
feet should be marshalled among WHALES — a word, which, in the 
popular sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness. But the creatures 
set down above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the terms 
of my definition of what a whale is — i. e., a spouting fish, with a hori- 
zontal tail. 

BOOK III. (Duodecimo), Chapter I. (Huzza Porpoise ). — This is 
the common porpoise found almost all over the globe. The name is 
of my own bestowal ; for there are more than one sort of porpoises, and 
something must be done to distinguish them. I call him thus, because 
he always swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep 
tossing themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth of July crowd. 
Their appearance is generally hailed with delight by the mariner. 
Full of fine spirits, they invariably come from the breezy billows to 
windward. They are the lads that always live before the wind. They 
are accounted a lucky omen. If you yourself can withstand three 
cheers at beholding these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye ; the spirit 
of godly gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-fed, plump Huzza Por- 
poise will yield you one good gallon of good oil. But the fine and 
delicate fluid extracted from his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in 
request among jewellers and watchmakers. Sailors put it on their 
hones. Porpoise meat is good eating, you know. It may never have 
occurred to you that a porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is so small 
that it is not very readily discernible. But the next time you have a 


128 MOBY DICK; OR 

chance, watch him; and yon will then see the great Sperm whale him- 
self in miniature. 

BOOK III. ( Duodecimo ), Chapter II. ( Algerine Porpoise ). — A 
pirate. Very savage. He is only found, I think, in the Pacific. He 
is somewhat larger than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the same 
general make. Provoke him, and he will buckle to a shark. I have 
lowered for him many times, but never yet saw him captured. 

BOOK III. (Duodeci mo), Chapter III. (Mealy-mouthed Porpoise). 
— The largest kind of Porpoise ; and only found in the Pacific, so far 
as it is known. The only English name, by which he has hitherto been 
designated, is that of the fishers — 'Bight-Whale Porpoise, from the cir- 
cumstance that he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Polio. In 
shape, he differs in some degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of a 
less rotund and jolly girth; indeed, he is quite a neat and gentlemanlike 
figure. He has no fins on his back (most other porpoises have), he 
has a lovely tail, and sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel hue. But his 
mealy-mouth spoils all. Though his entire back down to his side fins 
is of a deep sable, yet a boundary line, distinct as the mark in a ship’s 
hull, called the “bright waist,” that line streaks him from stem to 
stern, with two separate colours, black above, and white below. The 
white comprises part of his head, and the whole of his mouth, which 
makes him look as if he had just escaped from a felonious visit to a 
meal-bag. A most mean and mealy aspect ! His oil is much like that 
of the common porpoise. 

Beyond the Duodecimo, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as 
the Porpoise is the smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the 
leviathans of note. But there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half- 
fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by reputa- 
tion, but not personally. I shall enumerate them by their forecastle 
appellations ; for possibly such a list may be valuable to future investi- 
gators, who may complete what I have here but begun. If any of the 
following whales shall hereafter be caught and marked, then he can 
readily be incorporated into this system, according to his Folio, Octavo, 
or Duodecimo magnitude: — The Bottle-Hose Whale; the Junk Whale; 
the Pudding-Headed Whale ; the Cape Whale ; the Leading Whale ; the 


129 


THE WHITE WHALE 

Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Copper Whale; the Elephant 
Whale; the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale, etc. 
From Icelandic, Dutch, and old English authorities, there might be 
quoted other lists of uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of un- 
couth names. But I omit them as altogether obsolete ; and can hardly 
help suspecting them for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but sig- 
nifying nothing. 

Finally. It was stated at the outset, that this system would not 
be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have 
kept my word. But I now leave my cetological system standing thus 
unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the 
crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small 
erections may be finished by their first architects ; grand ones, true ones, 
ever leave the copestone to posterity. Heaven keep me from ever com- 
pleting anything. This whole book is but draught — nay, but the 
draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience! 


CHAPTER XXXII 

THE SPECKSYNDER 

Concerning the officers of the whale craft, this seems as good a place 
as any to set down a little domestic peculiarity on shipboard, arising 
from the existence of the harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown of 
course in any other marine than the whale fleet. 

The large importance attached to the harpooneer’s vocation is evinced 
by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries and 
more ago, the command of a whale ship was not wholly lodged in the 
person now called the captain, but was divided between him and an 
officer called the Specksynder. Literally this word means Fat-Cutter; 
usage, however, in time made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer. In 
those days, the captain’s authority was restricted to the navigation and 
general management of the vessel ; while over the whale-hunting depart- 
ment and all its concerns, the Specksynder or Chief Harpooneer reigned 
supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery, under the corrupted title 
of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is still retained, but his former 


130 


MOBY DICK; OR 

dignity is sadly abridged. At present be ranks simply as senior Har- 
pooneer ; and as such, is one of the Captain’s more inferior subalterns. 
Nevertheless as upon the good conduct of the harpooneers the success of 
a whaling voyage largely depends, and since in the American Fishery 
he is not only an important officer in the boat, but under certain circum- 
stances (night-watches on a whaling ground) the command of the 
ship’s deck is also his; therefore the grand political maxim of the sea 
demands, that he should nominally live apart from the men before the 
mast, and be in some way distinguished as their professional superior; 
though always, by them, familiarly regarded as their social equal. 

Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is 
this — the first lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in whale ships and 
merchantmen alike, the mates have their quarters with the captain ; and 
so, too, in most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in 
the after part of the ship. That is to say, they take their meals in the 
captain’s cabin, and sleep in a place indirectly communicating with it. 

Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the 
longest of all voyages now or ever made by man), the peculiar perils* 
of it, and the community of interest prevailing among a company, all 
of whom, high or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, 
but upon their common luck, together with their common vigilance, 
intrepidity, and hard work; though all these things do in some cases 
tend to beget a less rigorous discipline than in merchantmen generally ; 
yet, never mind how much like an old Mesopotamian family these whale- 
men may, in some primitive instances, live together; for all that, the 
punctilious externals, at least, of the quarter-deck are seldom materially 
relaxed, and in no instance done away. Indeed, many are the Nan- 
tucket ships in which you will see the skipper parading his quarter- 
deck with an elated grandeur not surpassed in any military navy ; nay, 
extorting almost as much outward homage as if he wore the imperial 
purple, and not the shabbiest of pilot-cloth. 

And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the 
least given to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only 
homage he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience, though he 
required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon 
the quarter-deck ; and though there were times when, owing to peculiar 


131 


the white whale 

circumstances connected with events hereafter to be detailed, he ad- 
dressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or in terrorem, 
or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by no means unobservant of 
the paramount forms and usages of the sea. 

Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those 
forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself ; incidentally 
making use of them for other and more private ends than they were 
legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain, 
which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested ; through 
those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible 
dictatorship. For he a man’s intellectual superiority what it will, it 
can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, 
without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, 
in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever 
keeps God’s true princes of the Empire from the world’s hustings ; and 
leaves the highest honours that this air can give, to those men who be- 
come famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden 
handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority 
over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these 
small things when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in 
some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. 
But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of 
geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian 
herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralisation. Nor will 
the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its 
fullest sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so im- 
portant in his art, as the one now alluded to. 

But Ahab, my captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket 
grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching emperors and 
kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old whale- 
hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings and 
housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab, what shall be grand in thee, it 
must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and 
featured in the embodied air ! 


132 


MOBY DICK; OR 


CHAPTER XXXIII 

THE CABIN-TABLE 

It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of- 
bread face from the cabin-scuttle, announces dinner to his lord and 
master; who, sitting in the lee quarter-boat, has just been taking an 
observation of the sun ; and is now mutely reckoning the latitude on the 
smooth, medallion-shaped tablet, reserved for that daily purpose on the 
upper part of his ivory leg. From his complete inattention to the tid- 
ings, you would think that moody Ahab had not heard his menial. 
But presently, catching hold of the mizzen shrouds, he swings him- 
self to the deck, and in an even, unexhilarated voice, saying, “Dinner, 
Mr. Starbuck,” disappears into the cabin. 

When the last echo of his sultan’s step has died away, and Starbuck, 
the first Emir, has every reason to suppose that he is seated, then Star- 
buck rouses from his quietude, takes a few turns along the planks, and, 
after a grave peep into the binnacle, says, with some touch of pleasant- 
ness, “Dinner, Mr. Stubb,” and descends the scuttle. The second 
Emir lounges about the rigging awhile, and then slightly shaking the 
main brace, to see whether it be all right with that important rope, he 
likewise takes up the old burden, and with a rapid “Dinner, Mr. Flask,” 
follows after his predecessors. 

But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck 
seems to feel relieved from some curious restraint ; for, tipping all sorts 
of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and kicking off his shoes, 
he strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right over the 
Grand Turk’s head ; and then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching his cap 
up into the mizzen-top for a shelf, he goes down rollicking, so far at 
least as he remains visible from the deck, reversing all other processions, 
by bringing up the rear with music. But ere stepping into the cabin 
doorway below, he pauses, ships a new face altogether, and, then, in- 
dependent, hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab’s presence, in the 
character of Abjectus, or the Slave. 

It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense 
artificialness of sea-usages, that while in the open air of the deck some 


THE WHITE WHALE 133 

officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves boldly and defyingly 
enough towards their commander ; yet, ten to one, let those very officers 
the next moment go down to their customary dinner in that same com- 
mander’s cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not to say deprecatory 
and humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of the table ; this is 
marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this difference? A 
problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon; 
and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously, therein 
certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he 
who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own 
private dinner-table of invited guests-, that man’s unchallenged power 
and dominion of individual influence for the time; that man’s royalty 
of state transcends Belshazzar’s, for Belshazzar was not the greatest. 
Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Ciesar. 
It is* a witchery of social czarship which there is no withstanding. Now, 
if to this consideration you superadd the official supremacy of a ship- 
master, then, by inference, you will derive the cause of that peculiarity 
of sea-life just mentioned. 

Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea- 
lion on the white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still 
deferential cubs. In his own proper turn, each officer waited to be 
served. They were as little children before Ahab; and yet, 
in Ahab, there seemed not to lurk the smallest social arrogance. With 
one mind, their intent eyes all fastened upon the old man’s knife, as he 
carved the chief dish before him, I do not suppose that for the world 
they would have profaned that moment with the slightest observation, 
even upon so neutral a topic as the weather. No ! And when reaching 
out his knife and fork, between which the slice of beef was locked, Ahab 
thereby motioned Starbuck’s plate towards him, the mate received his 
meat as though receiving alms ; and cut it tenderly ; and a little startled 
if, perchance, the knife grazed against the plate; and chewed it noise- 
lessly; and swallowed it, not without circumspection. For, like the 
Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor pro- 
foundly dines with the seven Imperial Electors, so these cabin meals 
were somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence ; and yet at table 
old Ahab forbade pot conversation ; only he himself was dumb. t Whgt 


134 


MOBY DICK; OR 

a relief it was to choking Stubb, when a rat made a sudden racket in 
the hold below. And poor little Flask, be was the youngest son, and 
little boy of this weary family party. His were the shinbones of the 
saline beef; bis would have been the drumsticks. For Flask to have 
presumed to help himself, this must have seemed to him tantamount 
to larceny in the first degree. Had he helped himself at that table, 
doubtless, never more would be have been able to bold bis bead up 
in this honest world; nevertheless, strange to say, Ahab never for- 
bade him. And bad Flask helped himself, the chances were Ahab bad 
never so much as noticed it. Least of all, did Flask presume to help 
himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners of the ship denied 
it to him, on account of its clotting his clear, sunny complex- 
ion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such market- 
less waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for 
him, a subaltern ; however it was, Flask, alas ! was a butterless 
man ! 

Another thing. Flask was the last person down at the dinner, and 
Flask is the first man up. Consider! For hereby Flask’s dinner was 
badly jammed in point of time. Starbuck and Stubb both had the 
start of him; and yet they also have the privilege of lounging in the 
rear. If Stubb even, who is but a peg higher than Flask, happens 
to have but a* small appetite, and soon shows symptoms of concluding 
his repast, then Flask must bestir himself, he will not get more than 
three’ mouthfuls that day; for it is against holy usage for Stubb to 
precede Flask to the deck. Therefore it was that Flask once admitted 
in private, that ever since he had risen to the dignity of an officer, from 
that moment he had never known what it was to be otherwise than 
hungry, more or less. For what he ate did not so much relieve his 
hunger, as keep it immortal in him. Peace and satisfaction, thought 
Flask, have for ever departed from my stomach. I am an officer; 
but, how I wish I could fish a bit of old-fashioned beef in the fore- 
castle, as I used to when I was before the mast. There’s the fruits of 
promotion now ; there’s the vanity of glory ; there’s the insanity of life ! 
Besides, if it were so that any mere sailor of the Pequod had a grudge 
against Flask in Flask’s official capacity, all that sailor had to do, in 
order to obtain ample vengeance, was to go aft at dinner-time, and get 


THE WHITE WHALE 


135 


a peep at Flask through the cabin skylight, sitting silly and dum- 
foundered before awful Ahab. 

Now, Ahab and his three mates formed what may he called the first 
table in the Pequod’s cabin. After their departure, taking place in 
inverted order to their arrival, the canvas cloth was cleared, or rather 
was restored to some hurried order by the pallid steward. And then 
the three harpooneers were hidden to the feast, they being its residuary 
legatees. They made a sort of temporary servants’ hall of the high 
and mighty cabin. 

In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless 
invisible domineer ings of the captain’s table, was the entire care-free 
licence and ease, the almost frantic democracy of those inferior fellows 
the harpooneers. While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the 
sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers chewed their 
food with such a relish that there was a report to it. They dined like 
lords; they filled their bellies like Indian ships all day loading with 
spices. Such portentous appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, that 
to fill out the vacancies made by the previous repast, often the pale 
Dough-Boy was fain to bring on a great baron of salt-junk, seemingly 
quarried out of the solid ox. And if he were not lively about it, if he 
did not go with a nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then Tashtego had an 
ungentlemanly way of accelerating him by darting a fork at his back, 
harpoon-wise. And once Daggoo, seized with a sudden humour, as- 
sisted Dough-Boy’s memory by snatching him up bodily, and thrusting 
his head into a great empty wooden trencher, while Tashtego, knife in 
hand, began laying out the circle preliminary to scalping him. He 
was naturally a very nervous, shuddering sort of little fellow, this 
bread-faced steward; the progeny of a bankrupt baker and a hospital 
nurse. And what with the standing spectacle of the black terrific 
Ahab, and the periodical tumultuous visitations of these three savages, 
Dough-Boy’s whole life was one continual lip-quiver. Commonly, after 
seeing the harpooneers furnished with all things they demanded, he 
would escape from their clutches into his little pantry adjoining, and 
fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door, till all was 
over. 

It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego, op- 


136 


MOBY DICK; OR 

posing his filed teeth to the Indian’s : crosswise to them, Daggoo seated 
on the floor, for a bench would have brought his hearse-plumed head 
to the low carlines; at every motion of his colossal limbs, making the 
low cabin framework to shake, as when an African elephant goes 
passenger in a ship. But for all this, the great negro was wonder- 
fully abstemious, not to say dainty. It seemed hardly possible that 
by such comparatively small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality 
diffused through so broad, baronial, and superb a person. But, doubt- 
less, this noble savage fed strong and drank deep of the abounding 
element of air; and through his dilated nostrils snuffed in the sub- 
lime life of the worlds. Hot by beef or by bread, are giants made or 
nourished. But Queequeg, he had a mortal, barbaric smack of the lip 
in eating — an ugly sound enough — so much so, that the trembling 
Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether any marks of teeth lurked 
in his own lean arms. And when he would hear Tashtego singing 
out for him to produce himself, that his hones might be picked, the 
simple-witted steward all hut shattered the crockery hanging around 
him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the palsy. Hor did the 
whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets, for their 
lances and other weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner, they 
would ostentatiously sharpen their knives ; that grating sound did not at 
all tend to tranquillise poor Dough-Boy. How could he forget that 
in his Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been guilty 
of some murderous, convivial indiscretions. Alas ! Dough-Boy ! hard 
fares the white waiter who waits upon cannibals. Hot a napkin 
should he carry on his arm, hut a buckler. In good time, though, to 
his great delight, the three salt-sea warriors would rise and depart; 
to his credulous, fable-mongering ears, all their martial bones jingling 
in them at every step, like Moorish scimitars in scabbards. 

But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally 
lived there; still, being anything but sedentary in their habits, they 
were scarcely ever in it except at meal-times, and just before 
sleeping-time, when they passed through it to their own peculiar 
quarters. 

In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American 
whale captains, who ? as a set, rather incline tp the opinion that by 


137 


THE WHITE WHALE 

rights the ship’s cabin belongs to them ; and that it is- by courtesy alone 
that anybody else is, at any time, permitted there. So that, in real 
truth, the mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might more properly he 
said to have lived out of the cabin than in it. For when they did 
enter it, it was something as a street-door enters a house; turning in- 
wards for a moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as a per- 
manent thing, residing in the open air. Mor did they lose much 
hereby; in the cabin was no companionship; socially, Ahab was in- 
accessible. Though nominally included in th'e census of Christen- 
dom, he was still an alien to it. He lived in the world, as the last 
of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when Spring 
and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying 
himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his 
own paws ; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab’s soul, shut up 
in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its 


CHAPTER XXXIY 

THE MASTHEAD 

It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with 
the other seamen my first masthead came round. 

In most American whalemen the mastheads are manned almost 
simultaneously with the vessel’s leaving her port ; even though she may 
have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper 
cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years’ voyage 
she is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her — say, an empty 
vial even — then, her mastheads are kept manned to the last; and not 
till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she al- 
together relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more. 

Mow, as the business of standing mastheads, ashore or afloat, is a 
very ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate 
here* I take it, that the earliest standers of mastheads were the old 
Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them. 
For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, 


138 


MOBY DICK; OR 

by their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest masthead in all Asia, 
or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was put to it) as that great 
stone mast of theirs, may be said to have gone by the board, in the 
dread gale of God’s wrath; therefore, we cannot give these Babel 
builders priority over the Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were a 
nation of masthead standers, is an assertion based upon the general 
belief among archaeologists, that the first pyramids were founded for 
astronomical purposes: a theory singularly supported by the peculiar 
stair-like formation of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with 
prodigious long upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were 
wont to mount to the apex, and sing out for new stars; even as the 
lookouts of a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing 
in sight. In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, 
who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole lat- 
ter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground 
with a tackle ; in him we have a remarkable instance of dauntless stand- 
er-of-mastheads ; who was not to be driven from his place by fogs or 
frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything out to the 
last, literally died at his post. Of modem standers-of-mastheads we 
have but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron, and bronze men; who, 
though well capable of facing out a stiff gale, are still entirely in- 
competent to the business of singing out upon discovering any strange 
sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of the column of Yen- 
dome, stands with arms folded, some one hundred and fifty feet in the 
air ; careless, now, who rules the decks below ; whether Louis Philippe, 
Louis Blanc, or Louis Napoleon. Great Washington, too, stands high 
aloft on his towering mainmast in Baltimore, and like one of Her- 
cules’ pillars, his column marks that point of human grandeur beyond 
which few mortals will go. Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of 
gun-metal, stands his masthead in Trafalgar Square; and even when 
most obscured by that London smoke, token is yet given that a hidden 
hero is there; for where there is smoke, must be fire. But neither 
great Washington, nor Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a single 
hail from below, however madly invoked, to befriend by their counsels 
the distracted decks upon which they gaze ; however, it may be 
surmised, that their spirits penetrate through the thick haze of 


THE WHITE WHALE 139 

the future and descry what shoals and what rocks must be 
shunned. 

It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the masthead 
standers of the land with those of the sea ; but that in truth it is not 
so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, the sole 
historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed tells 
us, that in the early times of the whale fishery, ere ships were 
regularly launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island 
erected lofty spars along the sea-coast, to which the lookouts ascended 
by means of nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a hen- 
house. A few years ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay whale- 
men of New Zealand, who, upon descrying the game, gave notice to 
the ready-manned boats nigh the beach. But this custom has now 
become obsolete; turn we then to the one proper masthead, that of a 
whale ship at sea. 

The three masts are kept manned from sunrise to sunset; the sea- 
men taking their regular turns, as at the helm, and relieving each other 
every two hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly 
pleasant — the masthead; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is de- 
lightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, 
striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while 
beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters 
of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous 
Colossus at old Khodes. There you stand, lost in the Infinite Series of 
the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently 
rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into lan- 
guor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime unevent- 
fulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with 
startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary 
excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; 
fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall 
have for dinner — for all your meals for three years and more are 
snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare- is immutable. 

In one of those southern whalemen, on a long three or four years’ 
voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at 
the masthead would amount to several entire months. And it is much 


140 MOBY DICK; OR 

to be deplored that the place to wliich you devote so considerable a 
portion of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly 
destitute of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted 
to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, 
a hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of 
those small and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate 
themselves. Your most usual point of perch is the head of the t’-gal- 
lanhmast, where you stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost pecul- 
iar to whalemen) call the t’-gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about 
by the sea, the beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing on 
a bull’s horns. To be sure, in cold weather you may carry your 
house aloft with you, in the shape of a watch-coat ; but properly speak- 
ing the thickest watch-coat is no more of a house than the unclad body ; 
for as the soul is glued inside of its fleshy tabernacle, and cannot 
freely move about in it, nor even move out of it, without running great 
risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps 
in winter) ; so a watch-coat is not so much of a house as it is a mere 
envelope, or additional skin encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or 
chest of drawers in your body, and no more can you make a con- 
venient closet of your watch-coat. 

Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads 
of a southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little 
tents or pulpits, called crow's-nests , in which the lookouts of a Green- 
land whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen 
seas. In the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled A Voyage 
among the Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally 
far the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland / 
in this admirable volume, all standers of mastheads are furnished with 
a charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented 
crow's-nest of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet’s good 
craft. He called it the Sleet's crow's-nest, in honour of himself; he 
being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous 
false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children after our 
own names (we fathers being the original inventors and patentees), 
so likewise should we denominate after ourselves any other apparatus 
we may beget. In shape, the Sleet's crow's-nest is something like a 
large tierce or pipe ; it is open above, however, where it is furnished 


141 


THE WHITE WHALE 

with a movable side-screen to keep to windward of yonr head in a hard 
gale. Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you ascend into it through 
a little trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after side, or side next the 
stern of the shi-p, is a comfortable seat, with a locker underneath for 
umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In front is a leather rack, in which 
to keep your speaking-trumpet, pipe, telescope, and other nautical 
conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his masthead in 
this crow’s nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him 
(also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for the 
purpose of popping off the stray narwhals, or vagrant sea unicorns 
infesting those waters ; for you cannot successfully shoot at them from 
the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon 
them is a very different thing. How, it was plainly a labour of love 
for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the little detailed con- 
veniences of his crow’s-nest; but though he so enlarges upon many 
of these, and though he treats us to a very scientific account of his 
experiments in this crow’s-nest, with a small compass he kept there 
for the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from what is 
called the “local attraction” of all binnacle magnets; an error as- 
cribable to the horizontal vicinity of the iron in the ship’s planks (and 
in the Gl'aciers case, perhaps, to there having been so many broken- 
down blacksmiths among her crew;) I say, that though the Captain is 
very discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his learned “binnacle devia- 
tions,” “azimuth compass observations,” and “approximate errors,” he 
knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was not so much immersed in 
those profound magnetic meditations, as to fail being attracted oc- 
casionally towards that well replenished little case-bottle so nicely 
tucked in on one side of his crow’s-nest, within easy reach of his hand. 
Though, upon the whole, I greatly admire and even love the brave, 
the honest, and learned Captain; yet I take it very ill of him that 
he should so utterly ignore that case-bottle, seeing what a faithful 
friend and comforter it must have been, while with mittened fingers 
and hooded head he was studying the mathematics aloft there in that 
bird’s nest within three or four perches of the pole. 

But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as 
Captain Sleet and his Greenland men were; yet that disadvantage is 
greatly counterbalanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those 


142 


MOBY DICK; OR 

seductive seas in which we Southern fishers mostly float. For one, I 
used to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to have 
a chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find 
there; then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg 
over the topsail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, 
and so at last mount to my ultimate destination. 

Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I 
kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in 
me, how could I — being left completely to myself at such a thought- 
engendering altitude, — how could I but lightly hold my obligations 
to observe all whale ships’ standing orders, “Keep your weather eye 
open, and sing out every time.” 

And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of 
Kantucket ! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with 
lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and 
who offers to ship with Phsedon instead of Bowditch in his head. 
Beware of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they 
can be killed; and this sunken-eyed Platonist will tow you ten wakes 
round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. 
Kor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale- 
fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and ab- 
sent-minded men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seek- 
ing sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently 
perches himself upon the masthead of some luckless disappointed whale- 
ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates — 

“Poll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll ! 

Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.” 

Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded 
young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient 
“interest” in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost 
to all honourable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would 
rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young 
Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect ; they are short- 
sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left 
their opera-glasses at home. 


THE WHITE WHALE 


143 


“Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads, “we’ve 
been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised 
a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up 
here.” Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals 
of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listless- 
ness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the 
blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his 
identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that 
deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature : and every 
strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him ; every dimly 
discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the 
embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by 
continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit 
ebbs away to whence it came ; becomes diffused through time and space ; 
like Wickliff’s sprinkled ashes forming at last a part of every shore 
the round globe over. 

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a 
gently rolling ship ; by her, borrowed from the sea ; by the sea, from 
the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on 
ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your 
identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. 
And perhaps, at midday, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled 
shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no 
more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists ! 


CHAPTER XXXY 

THE QUARTER-DECK 

(Enter Ahab: Then , all.) 

It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one morning 
shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the cabin gang- 
way to the deck. There most sea-captains usually walk at that hour, 
as country gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in the 
garden. 

Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his 


144 


MOBY DICK; OR 

old rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all 
over dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. 
Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there 
also, you would see still stranger footprints — the footprints of his 
one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought. 

But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even as 
his nervous step that morning left a deeper mark. And, so full of his 
thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he made, now at the 
mainmast and now at the binnacle, you could almost see that thought 
turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he paced ; so completely 
possessing him, indeed, that it all hut seemed the inward mould of 
every outer movement. 

“D’ye mark him, Flask?” whispered Stubb; “the chick that’s in 
him pecks the shell. ’Twill soon he out.” 

The hours wore on; — Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, 
pacing the deck, with the same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect. 

It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the 
bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there, and with 
one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send everybody 
aft. 

“Sir !” said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given 
on shipboard except in some extraordinary case. 

“Send everybody aft,” repeated Ahab. “Mastheads, there! come 
down !” 

When the entire ship’s company were assembled, and with curious 
and not wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked 
not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, 
after rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes 
among the crew, started from his standpoint ; and as though not a soul 
were nigh him resumed his heavy turns upon the deck. With bent 
head and half-slouched hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the 
wondering whispering among the men ; till Stubb cautiously whispered 
to Flask, that Ahab must have summoned them there for the purpose 
of witnessing a pedestrian feat. But this did not last long. Vehe- 
mently pausing he cried — 

“What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?” 


©C1KJC9284 



‘d’ye mark him, flask? 


SHELL. 


WHISPERED STUBB; 
TWILL SOON BE OUT.” 


© Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. 
‘the CHICK that’s IN HIM PECKS THE 


■*#>=-, - - 


1 


/ 


, 








































































































, 




































































THE WHITE WHALE 145 

“Sing out for him!” was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of 
clubbed voices. 

“Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval in bis tones; observing 
the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so mag- 
netically thrown them. 

“And what do ye next, men ?” 

“Lower away, and after him !” 

“And what tune is it ye pull to, men V 9 

“A dead whale or a stove boat !” 

More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving grew the 
countenance of the old man at every shout ; while the mariners began 
to gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was that they 
themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions. 

But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half revolving in 
his pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly, 
almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus — 

“All ye mastheaders have before now heard me give orders about 
a white whale. Look ye ! d’ye see this Spanish ounce of gold ?” — hold- 
ing up a broad bright coin to the sun — “it is a sixteen dollar piece, 
men. D’ye see it ? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul.” 

While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, 
was slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as 
if to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile 
lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and 
inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of 
his vitality in him. 

Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the 
mainmast with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold 
with the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: “Whosoever 
of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a 
crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with 
three holes punctured in his starboard fluke — look ye, whosoever of ye 
raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my 
boys !” 

“Huzza ! huzza !” cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they 
hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast. 


146 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“It’s a white whale, I say,” resumed Ahab, as he threw down the 
top-maul ; “a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men ; look sharp 
for white water ; if ye see but a bubble, sing out.” 

All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with 
even more intense interest and surprise than the rest, and at the men- 
tion of the wrinkled brow and crooked jaw, they had started as if each 
was separately touched by some specific recollection. 

“Captain Ahab,” said Tashtego, “that white whale must he the 
same that some call Moby Dick.” 

“Moby Dick?” shouted Ahab. “Do ye know the white whale then, 
Tash ?” 

“Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down ?” said the 
Gay-Header deliberately. 

“And has he a curious spout, too,” said Daggoo, “very bushy, even 
for a parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab ?” 

“And he have one, two, tree — oh ! good many iron in him hide, too, 
Captain,” cried Queequeg disjointedly, “all twisketee be-twisk, 
like him — him — ” faltering hard for a word, and screwing his 
hand round and round as though uncorking a bottle — “like him — 
him ” 

“Corkscrew!” cried Ahab; “ay, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all 
twisted and wrenched in him ; ay, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a 
whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after 
the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like 
a split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye 
have seen — Moby Dick — Moby Dick!” 

“Captain Ahab,” said Starbuck, who with Stuhb and Flask, had 
thus far been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, hut at last 
seemed struck with a thought which somewhat explained all the won- 
der. “Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick — hut it was not 
Moby Dick that took off thy leg?” 

“Who told thee that ?” cried Ahab ; then pausing. “Ay, Starbuck ; ay, 
my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby 
Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye,” 
he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart- 
stricken moose ; “aye, aye ! it was that accursed white whale that razed 
me ; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day !” Then 


THE WHITE WHALE 147 

tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: 
“Aye, aye ! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, 
and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before 
I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase 
that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till 
he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye 
splice hands on it, now ? I think ye do look brave.” 

“Aye, aye!” shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer 
to the excited old man: “a sharp eye for the White Whale; a sharp 
lance for Moby Dick !” 

“God bless ye,” he seemed to half sob and half shout, “God bless 
ye, men. Steward ! go draw the great measure of grog. But what’s 
this long face about, Mr. Starbuck? wilt thou not chase the white 
whale ? art not game for Moby Dick ?” 

“I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, 
Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow ; 
but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How 
many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, 
Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.” 

“Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou re- 
quirest a little lower layer. If money’s to be the measurer, man, and 
the accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, 
by girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch ; then, 
let me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium here!” 

“He smites his chest,” whispered Stubb, “what’s that for ? methinks 
it rings most vast, but hollow.” 

“Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “ that simply smote 
thee from blindest instinct ! Madness ! To be enraged with a dumb 
thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.” 

“Hark ye yet again, — the little lower layer. All visible objects, 
man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living 
act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing 
puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning 
mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the 
prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall ? To me, 
the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think 
there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me ; he heaps me ; 


148 


MOBY DICK; OR 

I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing 
it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and to be the white 
whale agent, or he the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate 
upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; Fd strike the sun if 
it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; 
since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over 
all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s 
over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intoler- 
able than fiends’ glarings is a doltish stare ! So, so ; thou reddenest and 
palest ; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starhuck, 
what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men from 
whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. 
Let it go. Look ! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn — living, 
breathing pictures painted by the sun. The pagan leopards — the un- 
recking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no 
reasons for the torrid life they feel ! The crew, man, the crew ! Are 
they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See 
Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. 
Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Star- 
huck! And what is it? Beckon it. ’Tis hut to help strike a fin; 
no wondrous feat for Starhuck. What is it more? From this one 
poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Bantucket, surely he will not 
hang back, when every foremost hand has clutched a whetstone ? Ah ! 
constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but 
speak ! — Aye, aye ! thy silence, that — that voices thee. (Aside) Some- 
thing shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. 
Starhuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.” 

“God keep me! — keep us all!” murmured Starhuck slowly. 

But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab 
did not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh from 
the hold ; nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in the cordage ; 
nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against the masts, as for a moment 
their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck’s downcast eyes lighted up 
with the stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh died away; the 
winds blew on; the sails filled out; the ship heaved and rolled as be- 
fore. Ah, ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye 


THE WHITE WHALE W9 

come ? But rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows ! 
Yet not so much predictions from without, as verifications of the fore- 
going things within. For with little external to constrain us, the 
innermost necessities in our being, these still drive us on. 

“The measure! the measure!” cried Ahah. 

Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he 
ordered them to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before 
him near the capstan, with their harpoons in their hands, while his 
three mates stood at his side with their lances, and the rest of the ship’s 
company formed a circle round the group; he stood for an instant 
searchingly eyeing every man of his crew. But those wild eyes met 
his, as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves meet the eye of their 
leader, ere he rushes on at their head in the trail of the bison; but, 
alas! only to fall into the hidden snare of the Indian. 

“Drink and pass !” he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to 
the nearest seaman. “The crew alone now drink. Bound with it, 
round ! Short draughts — long swallows, men ; ’tis hot as Satan’s hoof. 
So, so; it goes round excellently. It spiralises in ye; forks out 
at the serpenLsnapping eye. Well done; almost drained. That way 
it went, this way it comes. Hand it me — here’s a hollow ! Men, ye 
seem the years ; so brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill ! 

“Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan ; 
and ye mates, flank me with your lances and ye harpooneers, stand 
there with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I 
may in some sort revive an old custom of my fishermen fathers before 

me. O men, you will yet see that Ha ! boy, come back ? bad pennies 

come not sooner. Hand it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brim- 
ming again, wert not thou St. Vitus’ imp — away, thou ague! 

“Advance, ye mates ! Cross your lances full before me. Well done ! 
Let me touch the axis.” So saying, with extended arm, he grasped 
the three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre ; while so doing, 
suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently 
from Starbuck to Stubb ; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, 
by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into 
them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of 
his own magnetic life. The three mates quailed before his strong, 


150 


MOBY DICK; OR 

sustained, and mystic aspect. Stubb and Flask looked sideways from 
him ; the honest eye of Starbuck fell downright. 

“In vain !” cried Ahab; “but, maybe, ’tis well. For did ye three 
but once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, that 
had perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have 
dropped ye dead. Perchance ye need it not. Down lances ! And now, 
ye mates, I do appoint ye three cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen 
there — you three most honourable gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant 
harpooneers. Disdain the task? What, when the great pope washes 
the feet of beggars, using his tiara for ewer ? Oh, my sweet cardinals ! 
your own condescension, that shall bend ye to it. I do not order ye ; 
ye will it. Cut your seizings and draw the poles, ye harpooneers !” 

Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the 
detached iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs 
up before him. 

“Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! 
know ye not the goblet end ? Turn up the socket ! So ; so, now, ye 
cupbearers, advance. The irons ! take them ; hold them while I fill !” 
Forthwith, slowly going from one officer to the other, he brimmed 
the harpoon socket with the fiery waters from the pewter. 

“How three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! 
Bestow them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league. 
Ha! Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits 
to sit upon it. Drink ! ye harpooneers ! drink and swear, ye men that 
man the deathful whaleboat’s bow — Death to Moby Dick! God hunt 
us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death !” 

The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and male- 
dictions against the white whale, the spirits were simultaneously 
quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and shivered. 
Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds among 
the frantic crew; when waving his free hand to them they all dis- 
persed; and Ahab retired within his cabin. 


THE WHITE WHALE 


151 


CHAPTER XXXYI 

SUNSET 

(The cabin ; by the stern windows. Ahab sitting alone , and gazing out.) 

I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er 
I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let 
them; but first I pass. 

Yonder, by the ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush 
like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun — long 
dived from noon, — goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with 
her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear ? this Iron 
Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem ; I, the wearer, 
see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that daz- 
zlingly confounds. ’Tis iron — that I know — not gold. ‘Tis split, too 
— that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat 
against the solid metal. 

Dry heat upon my brow ? Oh ! time was, when as the sunrise nobly 
spurred me, so the sunset soothed. Ho more. This lovely light, it 
lights not me ; all loveliness i’s anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. 
Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; 
damned, most subtly -and most malignantly ! damned in the midst of 
Paradise ! Good-night — good-night ! ( waving his hand he moves from 
the window). 

’Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the 
least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and 
they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they 
all stand before me ; and I their match. Oh, hard ! that to fire others, 
the match itself must needs be wasting ! What I’ve dared, I’ve willed ; 
and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad — Starbuck does; 
but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness 
that’s only calm to comprehend itself ! The prophecy was- that I should 
be dismembered; and — Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I 
will dismember my dismemberer.. How, then, be the prophet and the 
fulfiller one. That’s more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh 
and hoot at ye, ye cricket players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and 


152 


MOBY DICK; OR 

Blinded Bendigoes ! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies, — Take 
some one of your own size; don’t pommel me! No, ye’ve knocked me 
down, and I am up again, but ye have run and hidden. Come forth 
from behind your cotton bags ! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, 
Abab’s compliments to ye ; come and see if you can swerve me. Swerve 
me ? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves ! man has ye there. 
Swerve me? T*he path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron nails, 
whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through 
the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush ! 
Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way! 


CHAPTER XXXVII 

DUSK 

(By the mainmast ; Starbuclc leaning against it.) 

My soul is more than matched ; she’s overmanned ; and by a madman ! 
Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! 
But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I 
think I see his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will 
I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable 
I have no knife to cut. Horrible old man ! Who’s over him, he cries ; 
— aye, he would he a democrat to all above ; look, how he lords it over 
all below ! Oh ! I plainly see my miserable office, — to obey, rebelling ; 
and worse yet, to hate with touch of pity ! For in his eyes I read some 
lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time 
and tide flow wide. The hated whale has the round, watery world to 
swim in, as the small gold-fish has its glassy globe. His heaven-in- 
sulting purpose, God may wedge aside. I would up-heart, were it not 
like lead. But my whole clock’s run down ; my heart the all controlling 
weight, I have no key to lift again. 

[A burst of revelry from the forecastle.] 
Oh, God ! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of 
human mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. 
The white whale is their demogorgon. Hark ! the infernal orgies ! that 
revelry is forward ! mark the unfaltering silence aft ! Methinks it 


THE WHITE WHALE 158 

pictures life. Foremost through the sparkling sea shoots on the gay, 
embattled, bantering how, but only to drag dark Ahab after it, where 
he broods within his sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of 
the wake, and, further on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long 
howl thrills me through ! Peace ! ye revellers, and set the watch ! Oh, 
life ! ’tis in an hour like this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge, 
as wild, untutored things are forced to feel — Oh, life! ’tis now that 
I do feel the latent horror in thee ! but ’tis not I ! that horror’s out of 
me ! and with the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to 
fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures ! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, 
0 ye blessed influences! 


CHAPTEK XXXVIII 

FIRST NIGHT-WATCH 

FORETOP 

( Stubb solus , and mending a brace.) 

Ha ! ha ! ha ! hem ! clear my throat ! — I’ve been thinking over it ever 
since, and that ha-ha’s the final consequence. Why so ? Because a 
laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer; and come what 
will, one comfort’s always left — that unfailing comfort is, it’s all pre- 
destinated. I heard not all his talk with Starbuck ; but to my poor eye 
Starbuck then looked something as I the other evening felt. Be sure 
the old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it; had had the 
gift, might readily have prophesied it — for when I clapped my eye 
upon his skull I saw it. Well, Stubb, wise Stubb — that’s my title — 
well, Stubb, what of it, Stubb ? Here’s a carcase. I know not all that 
may be coming, hut be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing. Such a 
waggish leering as lurks in all your horribles! I feel funny. Fa, 
la, lirra, skirra! What’s my juicy little pear at home doing now? 
Crying its eyes out? — Giving a party to the last arrived harpooneers, 
I dare say, gay as a frigate’s pennant, and so am I — fa, la! lirra, 
skirra ! Oh ! 


154 


MOBY DICK; OR 

We’ll drink to-night with hearts as light, 

To love, as gay and fleeting 
As bubbles that swim, on the beaker’s brim!. 

And break on the lips while meeting. 

A brave stave that — who calls! Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir — 
(Aside) he’s my superior, he has his too, if I’m not mistaken. — Aye, 
aye, sir, just through with this job — coming. 


CHAPTER XXXIX 

MIDNIGHT, FORECASTLE 
HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS 

(Foresail rises and discovers the watch standing, lounging, leaning, 
and lying in various attitudes, all singing in chorus.) 

Farewell and adieu to you Spanish ladies ! 

Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain! 

Our captain’s commanded. — 

FIRST NANTUCKET SAILOR 

Oh, boys, don’t be sentimental; it’s bad for the digestion! Take a 
tonic, follow me ! 


(Sings, and all follow.) 

Our captain stood upon the deck, 

A spy-glass in his hand, 

A viewing of those gallant whales 
That blew at every strand. 

Oh, your tubs in your boats, my boys. 

And by your braces stand, 

And we’ll have one of those fine whales, 
Hand boys, over hand ! 

So, be cheery, my lads ! may your hearts never fail ! 
While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale! 

mate’s voice from the quarter-deck 

Eight bells there, forward! 


THE WHITE WHALE 


155 


SECOND NANTUCKET SAILOR 

Avast the chorus ! Eight bells there ! d’ye hear, bell-boy ? Strike 
the bell eight, thou Pip! thou blackling! and let me call the watch. 
I’ve the sort of mouth for that — the hogshead mouth. So, so ( thrusts 
his head down the scuttle ), Star — bo-l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y! Eight bells 
there below! Tumble up! 


DUTCH SAILOR 

Grand snoozing to-night maty; fat night for that. I mark this in 
our old Mogul’s wine; it’s quite as deadening to some as filliping to 
others. We sing; they sleep — ay, lie down there, like ground-tier 
butts. At ’em again ! There, take this copper-pump, and hail ’em 
through it. Tell them to avast dreaming of their lassies. That’s the 
way — that's it ; thy throat ain’t spoiled with eating Amsterdam butter. 

FRENCH SAILOR 

Hist, boys ! let’s have a jig or two before we ride to anchor in Blanket 
Bay. What say ye ? There comes the other watch. Stand by all 
legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your tambourine! 

pip ( sulky and sleepy) 

Don’t know where it is. 

FRENCH SAILOR 

Beat thy belly, then, and wag thy ears. Jig it, men, I say; merry’s 
the word; hurrah! Damn me,* won’t you dance? Form, now, Indian 
file, and gallop into the double shuffle? Throw yourselves! Legs! 
legs ! 


ICELAND SAILOR 

I don’t like your floor, maty ; it’s too springy to my taste. I’m used 
to ice-floors. I’m sorry to throw cold water on the subject; but excuse 
me. 


MALTESE SAILOR 

Me too; where’s your girls? Who but a fool would take his left 


156 MOBY DICK; OR 

hand by his right, and say to himself, how d’ye do? Partners! I 
must have partners! 


SICILIAN SAILOR 

Aye; girls and a green! — then I’ll hop with ye; yea, turn grass- 
hopper ! 


LONG-ISLAND SAILOR 

Well, well, ye sulkies, there’s plenty more of us. Hoe corn when 
you may, say I. All legs go to harvest soon. Ah! here comes the 
music; now for it! 


AZORE SAILOR 

{Ascending, and pitching the tambourine up the scuttle ). 

Here you are, Pip; and there’s the windlass-bits; up you mount! 
ISTov;, hoys! 

{The half of them dance to the tambourine ; some go below ; some 
sleep or lie among the coils of rigging. Oaths a-plenty.) 

azore sailor {dancing). 

Go it, Pip! Bang it, hell-boy! Eig it, dig it, stig it, quig it, bell- 
boy! Make fire-flies; break the jigglers! 

pip 

Jigglers, you say? — there goes another, dropped off ; I pound it so. 
china sailor 

Eattle thy teeth, then, and pound away ; make a pagoda of thyself. 

FRENCH SAILOR. 

Merry-mad ! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it! Split 
jibs ! tear yourselves ! 


THE WHITE WHALE 157 

tashtego ( quietly smoking). 

That’s a white man ; he calls that fun : humph ! I save my sweat. 

OLD MANX SAILOR 

I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink them of what they are 
dancing over. I’ll dance over your grave, I will — that’s the bitterest 
threat of your night-women, that beats head-winds round corners. O 
Christ ! to think of the green navies and the green-skulled crews! Well, 
well ; belike the whole world’s a ball, as you scholars have it ; and so 
’tis right to make one ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you’re young; 
I was once. 


THIRD NANTUCKET SAILOR 

Spell oh ! — whew ! this is worse than pulling after whales in a calm 
— give us a whiff, Tash. 

( They cease dancing , and gather in clusters . Meantime the sky 
darkens — the wind rises.) 


LASCAR SAILOR 

By Brahma ! boys, it’ll be douse sail soon. The sky-born, high-tide 
Ganges turned to wind ! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva ! 

Maltese sailor ( reclining and shaking his cap) 

It’s the waves — the snow’s caps turn to jig it now. They’ll shake 
their tassels soon. Now would all the waves were women, then I’d 
go drown, and chassee with them evermore! There’s naught so sweet 
on earth — heaven may not match it ! — as those swift glances of warm, 
wild bosoms in the dance, when the over-arbouring arms hide such ripe, 
bursting grapes. 

Sicilian sailor X reclining ) 

Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad — fleet interlacings of the limbs — 
lithe swayings — coyings — flutterings! lip! heart! hip! all graze: un- 


158 MOBY DICK; OR 

ceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye, else come satiety. Eh, 
Pagan? {Nudging.) 

tahitan sailor {reclining on a mat ) 

Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls ! — the Heeva-Heeva ! Ah ! 
low-veiled, high-palmed Tahiti! I still rest me on thy mat, but the 
soft soil has slid ! I saw thee woven in the wood, my mat ! green the 
first day I brought ye thence ; now worn and wilted quite. Ah me ! — 
not thou nor I can hear the change ! How then, if so be transplanted 
to yon sky? Hear I the roaring streams from Pirohitee’s peak of 
spears, when they leap down the crags and drown the villages! — The 
blast! the blast! Up, spine, and meet it! {Leaps to his feet.) 

PORTUGUESE SAILOR 

How the sea rolls swashing ’gainst the side! Stand by for reefing, 
hearties ! the winds are just crossing swords, pell-mell they’ll go lung- 
ing presently. 

DANISH SAILOR 

Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou holdestl Well 
done! The mate there holds ye to it stiffly/ He’s no more afraid than 
the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic with storm-lashed 
guns, on which the sea-salt cakes! 

t 

FOURTH NANTUCKET SAILOR 

He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab tell him he must 
always kill a squall, something as they hurst a waterspout with a pistol 
— fire your ship right into it ! 

ENGLISH SAILOR 

Blood! but that old man’s a grand old cove! We are the lads to 
hunt him up his whale ! 


Aye! aye! 


ALL 


THE WHITE WHALE 


159 


OLD MANX SAILOR 

How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort of tree to 
live when shifted to any other soil, and here there’s none but the crew’s 
cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort of weather 
when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea. Our 
captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there’s another in the 
sky — lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch black. 

DAGGOO 

What of that ? Who’s afraid of black’s afraid of me ! I’m quarried 
out of it ! 


SPANISH SAILOR 

(Aside.) He wants to bully, ah ! — the old grudge makes me touchy. 
(Advancing.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark side 
of mankind — devilish dark at that. No offence. 

daggoo (grimly). 

None. 

ST. JAGO’s SAILOR 

That Spaniard’s mad or drunk. But that can’t be, or else in his own 
case our old Mogul’s fire-waters are somewhat long in working. 

FIFTH NANTUCKET SAILOR 

What’s that I saw — lightning? Yes. 

SPANISH SAILOR 

No; Daggoo showing his teeth. 

daggoo (springing). 

Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver! 

Spanish sailor (meeting him). 

Knife thee heartily ! big frame, small spirit ! 


160 


MOBY DICK; OR 


ALL 

A row ! a row ! a row ! 

Tashtego ( with a whiff). 

A row, a’ low, and a row aloft — gods and men — both brawlers! 
Humph ! 

BELFAST SAILOR 

A row! arrah, a row! The Virgin be blessed, a row! Plunge in 
with ye ! 


ENGLISH SAILOR 

Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard’s knife! A ring, a ring! 

OLD MANX SAILOR 

Heady formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ring Cain 
struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! Ho! 

MATE’S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. 

Hands by the halyards! in top-gallant sails! Stand by to reef top- 
sails ! 


ALL 

The squall! the squall! jump, my jollies! ( They scatter.) 
pip ( shrinking under the windlass). 

Jollies? Lord help such jollies! Crish, crash! there goes the jib- 
stay ! Blang-whang ! God ! Duck lower, Pip, here comes the royal 
yard ! It’s worse than being in the whirled woods, the last day of the 
year! Who’d go climbing after chestnuts now? But there they go, 
all cursing, and here I don’t. Fine prospects to ’em; they’re on the 
road to heaven. Hold on hard! Jimmini, what a squall! But those 
chaps there are worse yet — they are your white squalls, they.* White 
squalls? white whale, shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all their chat 
just now, and the white whale — shirr! shirr! — but spoken of once! 
and only this evening — it makes me jingle all over like my tambourine 


161 


THE WHITE WHALE 

that anaconda of an old man swore ’em in to hunt him! Oh, thou 
big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on 
this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have 
no bowels to feel fear ! 


CHAPTEK XL 

MOBY DICK 

I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the 
rest ; my oath had been welded with theirs ; and stronger I shouted, and 
more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. 
A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless 
feud seemed mine. With greedy ear' I learned the history of that mur- 
derous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of 
violence and revenge. 

For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied, 
secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilised seas mostly fre- 
quented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of 
his existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen 
him; while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given 
battle to him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number of 
whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire 
watery circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest 
along solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth 
or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any sort ; 
the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity of the 
times of sailing from home ; all these, with other circumstances, direct 
and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole world-wide 
whaling fleet of the special individualising tidings concerning Moby 
Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have 
encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian, a 
sperm whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, 
after doing great mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped 
them ; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the 
whale in question must have been no other than Moby Dick. Yet as 


162 


MOBY DICK; OR 

of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not 
unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the 
monster attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident igno- 
rantly gave battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most 
part, were content ix> ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it 
were, to the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the 
individual cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter 
between Ahab and the whale had hitherto been popularly 
regarded. 

And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by 
chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had 
every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, 
as for any other -whale of that species. But at length, such calamities 
did ensue in these assaults — not restricted to sprained wrists and 
ankles, broken limbs, or devouring amputations — but fatal to the last 
degree of fatality; those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating 
and piling their terrors upon Moby Dick ; those things had gone far to 
shake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the 
White Whale had eventually come. 

Hor did "wild rumours of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the 
more horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not 
only do fabulous rumours naturally grow out of the very body of all 
surprising terrible events, — as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi ; 
but, in maritime life, far more than in that of terra, firma , wild ru- 
mours abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling 
to. And as the sea surpasses the land in this - matter, so the whale- 
fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness 
and fearfulness of the rumours which- sometimes circulate there. For 
not only are whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and 
superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are 
by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is ap- 
pallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its 
greater marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such 
remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a 
thousand shores, you would not come to any chiselled hearthstones, or 
aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and 
longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman is 


163 


THE WHITE WHALE 

wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with 
many a mighty birth. 

No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit 
over the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumours of the White 
Whale did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of mor- 
bid hints, and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, 
which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed 
from anything that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a 
panic did he finally strike, that few who by those rumours, at least, 
had heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willing to 
encounter the perils of his jaw. 

But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work. 
Not even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm 
Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the levia- 
than, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are 
those this day among them, who, though intelligent and courageous 
enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right Whale, would per- 
haps — either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or timid- 
ity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale. At any rate, there are 
plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not sail- 
ing under the American flag, who have never hostilely encountered 
the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is re- 
stricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North. 
Seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish fire- 
side interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling. 
Nor is the pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale 
anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows 
which stem them. 

And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary 
times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book naturalists — 
Olassen and Povelson — declaring the Sperm Whale not only to be a 
consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be so in- 
credibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood. Nor 
even down to so late a time as Cuvier’s, were these or almost similar 
impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron himself 
affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) 


164 


MOBY DICK; OR 

are “struck with the most lively terrors,” and “often in the precipi- 
tancy of their flight dash themselves against the rocks with such vio- 
lence as to cause instantaneous death.” And however the general 
experiences in the fishery may amend such reports as these; yet in 
their full terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the 
superstitious belief in them is, in some vicissitudes of their vocation, 
revived in the minds of the hunters. 

So that overawed by the rumours and portents concerning him, not 
a few of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier 
days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to in- 
duce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this 
new and daring warfare; such men protesting that although other 
leviathans might he hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance 
at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man — 
that to attempt it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. 
On this head, there are some remarkable documents that may be 
consulted. 

Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things 
were ready to give chase to Moby Dick ; and a still greater number who, 
chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the spe- 
cific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious accom- 
paniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if offered. 

One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be 
linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously in- 
clined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous ; that 
he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the 
same instant of time. 

Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit alto- 
gether without some faint show of superstitious probability. Dor as 
the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even 
to the most erudite research ; so the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale 
when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to his 
pursuers ; and from time to time have originated the most curious and 
contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning the 
mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports 
himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points. 


165 


THE WHITE WHALE 

It is a thing well known to both American and English whale ships, 
and as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by 
Scoresby, that some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, 
in whose bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the 
Greenland seas, Hor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these in- 
stances it has been declared that the interval of time between the two 
assaults could not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by in- 
ference, it has been believed by some whalemen, that the Hor’-West 
Passage, so long a problem to man, was never a problem to the whale. 
So that here, in the real living experience of living men, the prodigies 
related in old times of the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near 
whose top there was said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships 
floated up to the surface) ; and that still more wonderful story of the 
Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have 
come from the Holy Land by an underground passage) ; these fabulous 
narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities of the whaleman. 

Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and know- 
ing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped 
alive ; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should 
go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only 
ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time) ; 
that though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would 
still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to 
spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for 
again in unensanguined billows hundred of leagues away, his unsullied 
jet would once more be seen. 

But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was 
enough in the earthly make and incontestable character of the mon- 
ster to strike the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not 
so much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other 
sperm whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out — a peculiar snow- 
white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidal white hump. These 
were his prominent features ; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, 
uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those 
who knew him. 

The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with 
the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive 


160 


MOBY DICK; OR 

appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by 
his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea, 
leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden 
gleamings. Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable 
hue, nor yet his deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale 
with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, 
according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in 
his assaults. More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of 
dismay than perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his ex- 
ulting pursuers, with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had 
several times been known to turn round suddenly, and, bearing down 
upon them, either stave their boats to splinters, or drive them back in 
consternation to their ship. 

Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though sim- 
ilar disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual 
in the fishery; yet in most instances, such seemed the White Whale’s 
infernal forethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death that 
he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an un- 
intelligent agent. 

Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds 
of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of 
chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of tom comrades, they swam out 
of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene; ex- 
asperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal. 

His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both, whirling 
in the eddies ; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, 
had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly 
seeking with a six-inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. 
That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his 
sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away 
Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned 
Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more 
seeing malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since 
that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness 
against the whale, all the more fell, for that in his frantic morbidness 
he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but 
all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale 


167 


THE WHITE WHALE 

swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious 
agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left 
living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malig- 
nity which has been from the beginning; which the ancient Ophites of 
the east reverenced in their statute devil; — Ahab did not fall down 
and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the 
abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All 
that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; 
all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the 
brain ; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought ; all evil, to crazy 
Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby 
Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the 
general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and 
then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell 
upon it. 

It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise 
at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at 
the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, pas- 
sionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore 
him, he probably felt the agonising bodily laceration, but nothing 
more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and 
for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched 
together in one hammock, rounding in mid-winter that dreary, howling 
Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled 
into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was 
only then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the final 
monomania seized him, seems all but certain from the fact that, at 
intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic ; and, though un- 
limbed of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian 
chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium, that his mates 
were forced to lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his ham- 
mock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales. 
And, when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild 
stun’sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics, and, to all ap- 
pearances, the old man’s delirium seemed left behind him with the 
Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark den into the blessed 
light and air ; even then, when he bore that firm, collected front, how- 


168 


MOBY DICK; OR 

ever pale, and issued his calm orders once again; and his mates 
thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in 
his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning 
and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but be- 
come transfigured into still subtler form. Ahab’s full lunacy subsided 
not, but deepeningly contracted ; like the unabated Hudson, when that 
noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the High- 
land gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot 
of Ahab’s broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad mad- 
ness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That 
before living agent, now became The living instrument. If such a 
furious trope may stand, this special lunacy stormed his general sanity, 
and carried it, and turned all its concentrated cannon upon its own 
mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that 
one end, did now possess a thousand-fold more potency than ever he 
had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object. 

This is much; yet Ahab’s larger, darker, deeper part remains un- 
hinted. But vain to popularise profundities, and all truth is pro- 
found. Winding far down from within the very heart of this spiked 
Hotel de Cluny where we here stand — however grand and wonderful, 
now quit it ; — and take your way, ye nobler, and sadder souls, 
to those vast Roman halls of Thermes ; where far beneath the fantastic 
towers of man’s upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful 
essence sits in bearded state; an antique buried beneath antiquities, 
and throned on torsoes ! So with a broken throne, the great gods mock 
that captive king ; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his 
frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye 
prouder, sadder souls ! question that proud, sad king ! A family like- 
ness ! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties ; and from your 
grim sire only will the old State-secret come. 

Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely, all my 
means are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to 
kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind 
he did long dissemble ; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his 
dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will de- 
terminate. Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, 
that when with ivory leg be stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer 


THE WHITE WHALE ie« 

thought him otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, 
with the terrible casualty which had overtaken him. 

The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly 
ascribed to a kindred cause. .And so too all the added moodiness which 
always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in* the Pequod on the 
present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so very unlikely, 
that far from distrusting his tkness for another whaling voyage, on 
account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent 
isle were inclined to harbour the conceit, that for those very reasons 
he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of 
rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and 
sore without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable 
idea ; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart 
his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes. Or, 
if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that, yet 
such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl 
on his underlings to the attack. But be all this as it may, certain it 
is, that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed 
in h;im, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the 
one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had 
any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what 
was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous 
souls have wrenched the ship from such a fienflish man! They were 
bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from 
the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and super- 
natural revenge. 

Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with 
curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, 
chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals 
— morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue 
or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indiffer- 
ence and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. 
Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some 
infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was 
that they so aboundingly responded to the old man’s ire — by what evil 
magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost 
theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how 


170 


MOBY DICK; OR 

all this came to be — what the White Whale was to them, or how to 
their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, 
he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life, — 
all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The 
subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads 
his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who does 
not feel the irresistible arm drag ? What skiff in tow of a seventy-four 
can stand still ? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the 
time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, 
could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill. 

CHAPTER XLI 

THE WHITENESS OF THE WHALE 

What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, 
he was to me, as yet remains unsaid. 

Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, 
which could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, 
there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning 
him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the 
rest; and yet so mystical and well-nigh ineffable was it, that I almost 
despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness 
of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope 
to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain 
myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught. 

Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances 
beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, 
japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way 
recognised a certain royal pre-eminence in this hue ; even the barbaric, 
grand old kings of Pegu placing the title “Lord of the White Ele- 
phants” above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; 
and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quad- 
ruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one 
figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, 
Caesarian heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial colour the 
same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the 


THE WHITE WHALE m 

human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every 
dusky tribe; and though, besides all this, whiteness has been even made 
significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked 
a j°yful day ; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolisings, 
this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things — 
the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red 
Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deep- 
est pledge of honour; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the 
majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the 
daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds ; though 
even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been 
made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian 
fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the 
altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made 
incarnate in a snow-white bull ; and though to the noble Iroquois, the 
mid-winter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest 
festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the 
purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings 
of their fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, 
all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, 
the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock ; and though among the holy 
pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebra- 
tion of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, 
white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders 
stand clothed in white before the great white throne, and the Holy One 
that sitteth there white like wool ; yet for all these accumulated associ- 
ations, with whatever is sweet, and honourable, and sublime, there yet 
lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which 
strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in 
blood. 

This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, 
when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any 
object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. 
Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics ; 
what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent 
horrors they are ? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an 
abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb 


172 


MOBY DICK; OR 

gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his 
heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or 
shark . 1 

Bethink thee of the albatross : whence come those clouds of spiritual 
wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all 
imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God’s great, 
unflattering laureate, Nature . 2 

1 With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who 
would fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the whiteness, 
separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that 
brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only arises 
from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the creature 
stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by 
bringing together two such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar benr 
frightens us with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all this to be 
true; yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have that intensified 
terror. 

As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that 
creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the same 
quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly hit by the 
Prench in the name they bestow upon that fish. The Komish mass for the 
dead begins with “Requiem eternam” (eternal rest), whence Requiem de- 
nominating the mass itself, and any other funereal music. Now in allusion 
to the white, silent stillness of death in this shark, and the mild deadliness 
of his habits, the French call him Requin. 

2 1 remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged 
gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch be- 
low, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main 
hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a 
hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel 
wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throb- 
bings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king’s 
ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, me- 
thought I peeped to secrets not below the heavens. As Abraham before the 
angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and 
in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories 
of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I 
cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through me then. But 
at last I awoke; and turning, asked a sailor what bird was this. A goney, 
he replied. Goney! I never had heard that name before; is it conceivable 
that this glorious thing is utterly unknown to men ashord! never! But 
some time after, I learned that goney was some seaman’s nanfe for albatross. 
So that by no possibility could Coleridge’s wild Rhyme have had aught to 
do with those mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird 
upon our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird 
to be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a little 
brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet. 

I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly 


173 


THE WHITE WHALE 

Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that 
of the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, 
large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a 
thousand monarchs in his lofty, over-scorning carriage. He was 
the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those 
days were only fenced by the Pocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. 
At their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star 
which every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade 
of his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings 
more resplendent than gold and silver-heaters could have furnished him. 
A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western 
world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the 
glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god, 
bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching 
amid his aides and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that end- 
lessly streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his 
circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White 
Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through 
his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always 
to the bravest Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe. 
Xor can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of 
this noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so 
clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it 
which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain 
nameless terror. 

But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that acces- 
sory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and 
Albatross. 

What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often 
shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin ! 

lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a 
solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I have 
frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic 
fowl. 

But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will 
tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea. At 
last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered, leathern tally round 
its neck, with the ship’s time and place; and then letting it escape. 


174 


MOBY DICK; OR 

It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name 
he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men — has no substantive 
deformity — and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes 
him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should 
this be so? 

Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but 
not the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forces this crown- 
ing attribute of the terrible. From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted 
ghost of the Southern Seas has been denominated the White Squall. 
Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of human malice omitted so 
potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of that passage 
in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their faction, the 
desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the market- 
place ! 

Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all 
mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It 
cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of the 
dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there ; 
as if indeed that pallor were much like the badge of consternation in 
the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And from that pallor 
of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we 
wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same 
snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white 
fog. — Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king 
of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse. 

Therefore, in his other moods, symbolise whatever grand or gracious 
thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest 
idealised significance it calls up a peculiar apparition of the soul. 

But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to 
account for it ? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then, 
by the citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of white- 
ness — though for the time either wholly or in a great part stripped of 
all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful, but, 
nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however modi- 
fied; — can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct 
us to the hidden cause we seek ? 

Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, 


175 


THE WHITE WHALE 

and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls. 
And though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative impressions 
about to be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few 
perhaps were entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore 
may not be able to recall them now. 

Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be hut loosely 
acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare men- 
tion of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary, speechless 
processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, downcast and hooded with new- 
fallen snow? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of the 
Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a White 
Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul? 

Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors 
and kings (which will not wholly account for it) that makes the White 
Tower of London tell so much more strongly on the imagination of an 
untravelled American, than those other storied structures, its neigh- 
bours — the By ward Tower, or even the Bloody? And those sublimer 
towers, the White # mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in peculiar 
moods, comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at the bare mention 
of that name, while the thought of Virginia’s Blue Ridge is full of a 
soft, dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all latitudes 
and longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a spectral- 
ness over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal 
thoughts of long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by 
the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets ? Or, to choose a wholly un- 
substantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading 
the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does “the tall pale man” of the 
Hartz forest, whose changeless pallor unrustlingly glides through the 
green of the groves — why is this phantom more terrible than all the 
whooping imps of the Blocksburg? 

Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earth- 
quakes ; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas ; nor the tearlessness of 
arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning 
spires, wrenched copestones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards 
of anchored fleets) ; and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over 
upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards ; — it is not these things alone 
which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou canst see. 


176 


MOBY DICK; OR 

For Lima lias taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this 
whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins 
for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; 
spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that 
fixes its own distortions. 

I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of white- 
ness is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror 
of objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there 
aught of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind 
almost solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhib- 
ited under any form at all approaching to muteness or universality. 
What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be respectively 
elucidated by the following examples. 

First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, 
if by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels 
just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under pre- 
cisely similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to 
view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky-whiteness — as 
if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swim- 
ming round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the 
shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real 
ghost ; in vain the lead assures him he is still off soundings ; heart and 
helm they both go down; he never rests till blue water is under him 
again. Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, “Sir, it was not 
so much the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous 
whiteness that so stirred me?” 

Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the 
snow-howdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the 
mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast 
altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to 
lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the 
back-woodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views 
an unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or 
twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, behold- 
ing the scenery of the Antarctic seas ; where at times, by some infernal 
trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and 
half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his 


THE WHITE WHALE 177 

misery, views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him 
with its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses. 

But thou sayest, methinks this white-lead chapter about whiteness 
is but a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to 
a hypo, Ishmael. 

Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley 
of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey — why is it that upon 
the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so 
that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness — 
why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in 
frenzies of affright ? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings 
of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muski- 
ness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experi- 
ence of former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of 
the black bisons of distant Oregon? 

No : but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the 
knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles 
from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring 
bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, 
which this instant they may be trampling into dust. 

Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings 
of the festooned frosts of mountains ; the desolate shiftings of the wind- 
rowed snows of prairies ; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of 
that buffalo robe to the frightened colt ! 

Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the 
mystic sign gives forth such hints ; yet with me, as with the colt, some- 
where those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this 
visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed 
in fright. 

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and 
learned why it appeals with such power to the soul ; and more strange 
and far more portentous — why, as we have seen, it is at once the most 
meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Chris- 
tian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things 
the most appalling to mankind. 

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids 
and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with 


178 


MOBY DICK; OR 

the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the 
milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a 
colour as the visible absence of colour, and at the same time the con- 
crete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb 
blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows — a colourless, 
all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider 
that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly 
hues — every stately or lovely emblazoning — the sweet tinges of sunset 
skies and woods ; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the but- 
terfly cheeks of young girls ; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually 
inherent in substance, but only laid on from without; and when we 
proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which pro- 
duces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever 
remains white or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium 
upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its 
own blank tinge — pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before 
us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear 
coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel 
gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all 
the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was 
the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt ? 


CHAPTER XLII 

HARK ! 

“Hist! Hid you hear that noise, Cabaco?” 

It was the middle-watch; a fair moonlight; the seamen were stand- 
ing in a cordon, extending from one of the fresh water butts in the 
waist, to the scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed 
the buckets to fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on 
the hallowed precincts of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to 
speak or rustle their feet. From hand to hand, the buckets went in 
the deepest silence, only broken by the occasional flap of a sail, and the 
steady hum of the unceasingly advancing keel. 

It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon, 


179 


THE WHITE WHALE 

whose post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbour, a 
Cholo, the words above. 

“Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?” 

“Take the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d’ye mean?” 

“There it is again — under the hatches — don’t you hear it ? — a cough 
— it sounded like a cough.” 

“Cough be damned ! Pass along that return bucket.” 

“There again — there it is ! — it sounds like two or three sleepers turn- 
ing over, now!” 

“Caramba ! have done, shipmate, will ye ? It’s the three soaked 
biscuits ye eat for supper turning over inside of ye — nothing else. 
Look to the bucket!” 

“Say what ye will, shipmate; I’ve sharp ears.” 

“Ay, you are the chap, ain’t ye, that heard the hum of the old Quak- 
eress’s knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Hantucket; you’re the 
chap.” 

“Grin away; we’ll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is 
somebody down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck ; and 
I suspect our old Mogul knows something of it too. I heard Stubb 
tell Flask, one morning watch, that there was something of that sort 
in the wind.” 

“Tish ! the bucket !” 


CHAPTER XLIII 

THE CHAET 

Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall 
that took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his 
purpose with his crew, you would have seen him go to a locker in the 
transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts, 
spread them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating him- 
self before it, you would have seen him intently study the various lines 
and shadings which there met his eye ; and with slow but steady pencil 
trace additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At in- 
tervals, he would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein 


180 


MOBY DICK; OR 

were set down the seasons and places in which, on various former voy- 
ages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen. 

While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains 
over his head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for 
ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, 
till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and 
courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing 
lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead. 

But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his 
cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they 
were brought out ; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, 
and others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans 
before him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with 
a view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought 
of his soul. 

Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the levia- 
thans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one 
solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so 
did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents ; and 
thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale’s food ; and, also, 
calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in 
particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost ap- 
proaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this 
or that ground in search of his prey. 

So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodioalness of the 
sperm whale’s resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe that, 
could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world; were 
the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated, then 
the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in 
invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows. 
On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory 
charts of the sperm whale . 1 

1 Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out by an 
official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory, 
Washington, 16th April 1851. By that circular, it appears that precisely 
such a chart is in course of completion; and portions of it are presented 
in the circular. “This chart divides the ocean into districts of five degrees 
of latitude by five degrees of longitude; perpendicularly through each of 


181 


THE WHITE WHALE 

Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, 
the sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct — say, rather, secret 
intelligence from the Deity — mostly swim in veins , as they are called ; 
continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such undeviating 
exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any charts, with one 
tithe of such marvellous precision. Though, in these cases, the direc- 
tion taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor’s parallel, and 
though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own unavoidable, 
straight wake, yet the arbitrary vein in which at these times he is said 
to swim, generally embraces some few miles in width (more or less, as 
the vein is presumed to expand or contract) ; but never exceeds the visual 
sweep from the whale ship’s mastheads, when circumspectly gliding 
along this magic zone. The sum is, that at particular seasons within 
that breadth and along that path, migrating whales may with great con- 
fidence be looked for. 

And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known sepa- 
rate feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in 
crossing the widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, 
by his art, so place and time himself on his way, as even then not to 
be wholly without prospect of a meeting. 

There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle 
his delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality, 
perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular 
seasons for particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that 
the herds which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this 
year, say, will turn out to be identically the same with those that were 
found there the preceding season; though there are peculiar and un- 
questionable instances where the contrary of this has proved true. In 
general, the same remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to the 
solitaries and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales. So 
that though Moby Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on 
what is called the Seychelle ground in the Indian Ocean, or Volcano 

which districts are twelve columns for the twelve months; and horizontally 
through each of which districts are three lines; one to show the number of 
days that have been spent in each month in every district, and the two 
others to show the number of days in which whales, sperm or right, have 
been seen.” 


182 


MOBY DICK; OR 

Bay on the Japanese coast; yet it did not follow, that were the Pequod 
to visit either of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season, 
she would infallibly encounter him there. So, -too, with some other 
feeding-grounds, where he had at times revealed himself. But all 
these seemed only his casual stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to speak, 
not his places of prolonged abode. And where Ahab’s chances of ac- 
complishing his object have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only 
been made to whatever wayside, antecedent, extra prospects were his, 
ere a particular set time or place were attained, when all possibilities 
would become probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possi- 
bility the next thing to a certainty. That particular set time and place 
were conjoined in the one technical phrase — the Season-on-the-Line. 
For there and then, for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been 
periodically described, lingering in those waters for a while, as the sun, 
in its annual round, loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign of 
the Zodiac. There it was, too, that most of the deadly encounters with 
the white whale had taken place; there the waves were storied with 
his deeds; there also was that tragic spot where the monomaniac old 
man had found the awful motive to his vengeance. But in the cautious 
comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which Ahab threw 
his brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would not permit him- 
self to rest all his hopes upon the one crowning fact above mentioned, 
however flattering it might he to those hopes; nor in the sleeplessness 
of his vow could he so tranquillise his unquiet heart as to postpone all 
intervening quest. 

Eow, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning 
of the Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavours then could enable 
her commander to make the great passage southwards, double Cape 
Horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the 
equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait 
for the next ensuing season. Yet the premature hour of the Pequod 3 s 
sailing had, perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to 
this very complexion of things. Because, an interval of three hundred 
and sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval which, in- 
stead of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous 
hunt ; if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far re- 
mote from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled 


THE WHITE WHALE 183 

brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any 
other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor’- 
Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoom, 
might blow Moby Dick into the devious zigzag world-circle of the 
Pequod’s circumnavigating wake. 

But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it 
not but a mad idea, this — that in the broad boundless ocean, one soli- 
tary whale, even if encountered, should be thought capable of individual 
recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the 
thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. Por the peculiar 
snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not 
but be unmistakable. “And have I not tallied the whale,” Ahab would 
mutter to himself, as after poring over his charts till long after mid- 
night he would throw himself back in reveries — “tallied him, and shall 
he escape? His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost 
sheep’s ear!” And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless 
race ; till a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him ; and in 
the open air of the deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, 
God ! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed 
with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched 
hands ; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms. 

Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably 
vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts 
through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of frenzies, and 
whirled them round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throb- 
bing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was 
sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up 
from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked 
flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to 
leap down among them ; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, 
a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes 
Ahab would burst from his state-room, as though escaping from a 
bed that was on fire. Yet these perhaps, instead of being unsuppress- 
able symptoms of some latent weakness, of fright at his own resolve, 
were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. Por, at such times, Ahab, 
the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this 
Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused 


184 


MOBY DICK; OR 

him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, liv- 
ing principle or soul in him ; and in sleep, being for the time dissoci- 
ated from the characterising mind, which at other times employed it 
for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the 
scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was 
no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued 
with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding 
up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose ; that pur- 
pose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and 
devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own ; nay, 
could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was 
conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unhidden and unfeathered 
birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, 
when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was, for the time, but 
a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, 
to be sure, but without an object to colour, and therefore a blankness in 
itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature 
in thee ; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus ; 
a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever ; that vulture the very creature 
he creates. 


CHAPTER XLIV 

THE AFFIDAVIT 

So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book ; and, indeed, 
as indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious particu- 
lars in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in its earlier 
part, is as important a one as will be found in this volume ; the leading 
matter of it requires to be still further and more familiarly enlarged 
upon, in order to be adequately understood, and moreover to take away 
any incredulity which a profound ignorance of the entire subject may 
induce in some minds, as to the natural verity of the main points of 
this affair. 

I care not to perform this part of my task methodically ; but shall be 
content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of items, 


185 


THE WHITE WHALE 

practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from these 
citations — I take it — the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of 
itself. 

First: I have personally known three instances where a whale, after 
receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an in- 
terval (in one instance of three years), has been again struck by the 
same hand, and slain; when the two irons, both marked by the same 
private cypher, have been taken from the body. In the instance where 
three years intervened between the flinging of the two harpoons; and 
I think it may have been something more than that ; the man who darted 
them happening, in the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage 
to Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party and penetrated 
far into the interior, where he travelled for a period of nearly two 
years, often endangered by, serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, 
with all the other common perils incident to wandering in the heart of 
unknown regions. Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also have 
been on its travels ; no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe, 
brushing with its flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose. 
This man and this whale again came together, and the one vanquished 
the other. I say, I myself have known three instances similar to this ; 
that is, in two of them I saw the whales struck, and, upon the second 
attack, saw the two irons with the respective marks cut in them, after- 
wards taken from the dead fish. In the three-year instance, it so fell 
out that I was in the boat both times, first and last, and the last time 
distinctly recognised a peculiar sort of huge mole under the whale’s 
eye, which I had observed there three years previous. I say three 
years, but I am pretty sure it was more than that. Here are three 
instances, then, which I personally know the truth of ; but I have heard 
of many other instances from persons whose veracity in the matter 
there is no good ground to impeach. 

Secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale Fishery, however 
ignorant the world ashore may be of it, that there have been several 
memorable historical instances where a particular whale in the ocean 
has been at distant times and places popularly cognisable. Why such 
a whale became thus marked was not altogether and originally owing 
to his bodily peculiarities as distinguished from other whales ; for how- 
ever peculiar in that respect any chance whale may be they soon put an 


186 


MOBY DICK; OR 

end to his peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a 
peculiarly valuable oil. No; the reason was this: that from the fatal 
experiences of the fishery there hung a terrible 'prestige of perilousness 
about such a whale as there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that 
most fishermen were content to recognise him by merely touching their 
tarpaulins when he would be discovered lounging by them on the sea, 
without seeking to cultivate a more intimate acquaintance. Like some 
poor devils ashore that happen to know an irascible great man, they 
make distant unobtrusive salutations to him in the street, lest if they 
pursued the acquaintance further, they might receive a summary thump 
for their presumption. 

But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual 
celebrity — Nay, you may call it an ocean- wide renown; not only was 
he famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after death, 
but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions 
of a name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Caesar. Was 
it not so, O Timor Tom ! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, 
who so long didst lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout 
was oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, 0 New 
Zealand J ack ! thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the 
vicinity of the Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of 
Japan, whose lofty jet they say at times assumed the semblances of a 
snow-white cross against the sky? Was it not so, 0 Don Miguel! thou 
Chilian whale, marked like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics 
upon the back ? In plain prose, here are four whales as well known to 
the students of Cetacean History as Marius or Sylla to the classic 
scholar. 

But this is not all. New Zealand Jack and Don Miguel, after at 
various times creating great havoc among the boats of different vessels, 
were finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out, chased and 
killed by valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their anchors with 
that express object as much in view, as in setting out through the Narra- 
gansett woods, Captain Butler of old had it in his mind to capture that 
notorious murderous savage Annawon, the headmost warrior of the In- 
dian King Philip. 

I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make 
mention of one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in 


187 


THE WHITE WHALE 

printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the whole 
story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For this 
is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full as 
much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of 
the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some 
hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, 
they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and 
more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory. 

First: Though most men have some vague flitting ideas of the gen- 
eral perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a fixed, vivid 
conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they recur. 
One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters and 
deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at home, 
however transient and immediately forgotten that record. Do you sup- 
pose that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by the 
whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to the 
bottom of the sea by the sounding leviathan — do you suppose that that 
poor fellow’s name will appear in the newspaper obituary you will read 
to-morrow at your breakfast ? No: because the mails are very irregular 
between here and New Guinea. In fact, did you ever hear what might 
be called regular news direct or indirect from New Guinea? Yet I 
tell you that upon one particular voyage which I made to the Pacific, 
among many others we spoke thirty different ships, every one of which 
had had a death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three 
that had each lost a boat’s crew. For God’s sake, be economical with 
your lamps and candles ! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop 
of man’s blood was spilled for it. 

Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a 
whale is an enormous creature of enormous power; but I have ever 
found that when narrating to them some specific example of this two- 
fold enormousness, they have significantly complimented me upon my 
facetiousness; when, I declare upon my soul, I had no more idea of 
being facetious than Moses when he wrote the history of the plagues 
of Egypt. 

But fortunately the special point I here seek can be established upon 
testimony entirely independent of my own. That point is this: The 
Sperm Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful, knowing, and judi- 


188 


MOBY DICK; OR 


ciously malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in, utterly de- 
stroy, and sink a large ship; and what is more, the Sperm Whale has 
done it. 

First: In the year 1820 the ship Essex , Captain Pollard, of Nan- 
tucket, was cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One day she saw spouts, 
lowered her boats, and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales. Ere long, 
several of the whales were wounded ; when, suddenly, a very large whale 
escaping from the boats, issued from the shoal, and bore directly down 
upon the ship. Dashing his forehead against her hull, he so stove hei 
in, that in less than “ten minutes” she settled down and fell over. Not 
a surviving plank of her has been seen since. After the severest ex- 
posure, part of the crew reached the land in their boats. Being re- 
turned home at last, Captain Pollard once more sailed for the Pacific 
in command of another ship, but the gods shipwrecked him again upon 
unknown rocks and breakers ; for the second time his ship was utterly 
lost, and forthwith forswearing the sea, he has never tempted it since. 
At this day Captain Pollard is a resident of Nantucket. I have seen 
Owen Chace, who was chief mate of the Essex at the time of the 
tragedy; I have read his plain and faithful narrative; I have conversed 
with his son ; and all this within a few miles of the scene of the catas- 
trophe. 1 

1 The following are extracts from Chace’s narrative : “Every fact seemed 
to warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which directed 
his operations ; he made two several attacks upon the ship, at a short interval 
between them, both of which, according to their direction, were calculated 
to do us the most injury, by being made ahead, and thereby combining the 
speed of the two objects for the shock; to effect which the exact manoeuvres 
which he made were necessary. His aspect was most horrible, and such as 
indicated resentment and fury. He came directly from the shoal which we 
had just before entered, and in which we had struck three of his companions, 
as if fired with revenge for their sufferings.” Again: “At all events, the 
whole circumstances taken together, all happening before my own eyes, and 
producing, at the time, impressions in my mind of decided, calculating 
mischief, on the part of the whale (many of which impressions I cannot now 
recall), induce me to be satisfied that I am correct in my opinion.” 

Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during a black 
night in an open boat, w r hen almost despairing of reaching any hospitable 
shore. “The dark ocean and swelling waters were nothing; the fears of being 
swallowed up by some dreadful tempest, or dashed upon hidden rocks, with 
all the other ordinary subjects of fearful contemplation, seemed scarcely en- 
titled to a moment’s thought; the dismal-looking wreck, and the horrid aspect 
and revenge of the whale , wholly engrossed my reflections, until day again 


189 


THE WHITE WHALE 

Secondly: The ship Union , also of Nantucket, was in the year 1807 
totally lost off the Azores by a similar onset, hut the authentic particu- 
lars of this catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter, though from 
the whale-hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions to it. 

Thirdly: Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J , 

then commanding an American sloop-of-war of the first class, happened 
to be dining with a party of whaling captains, on hoard a Nantucket 
ship in the harbour of Oahu, Sandwich Islands. Conversation turning 
upon whales, the Commodore was pleased to he sceptical touching the 
amazing strength ascribed to them by the professional gentlemen pres- 
ent. He peremptorily denied, for example, that any whale could so 
smite his stout sloop-of-war as to cause her to leak so much as a thimble- 
ful. Very good; hut there is more coming. Some weeks after, the 
Commodore set sail in this impregnable craft for Valparaiso. But he 
was stopped on the way by a portly sperm whale, that begged a few 
moments’ confidential business with him. That business consisted 
in fetching the Commodore’s craft such a thwack, that with all his 
pumps going he made straight for the nearest port to heave down and 
repair. I am not superstitious, but I consider the Commodore’s inter- 
view with that whale as providential. I tell you, the sperm whale will 
stand no nonsense. 

I will now refer you to Langsdorff' s Voyages for a little circumstance 
in point, peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof. Langsdorff, you 
must know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral Krusen- 
stem’s famous Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the present 
century. Captain Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter. 

“By the thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail, and the next 
day we were out in the open sea, on our way to Ochotsh. The weather 
was very clear and fine, but so intolerably cold that we were obliged to 
keep on our fur clothing. Eor some days we had very little wind; it 
was not till the nineteenth that a brisk gale from the north-west sprang 
up. An uncommon large whale, the body of which was larger than the 
ship itself, lay almost at the surface of the water, but was not perceived 
by any one on board till the moment when the ship, which was in full 

made its appearance.” In another place — p. 45, — he speaks of “ the mysterious 
and mortal attack of the animal .” 


190 


MOBY DICK; OR 

sail, was almost upon him, so that it was impossible to prevent its strik- 
ing against him. We were thus placed in the most imminent danger, 
as this gigantic creature, setting up its back, raised the ship three feet 
at least out of the water. The masts reeled, and the sails fell altogether, 
while we who were below all sprang instantly upon the deck, con- 
cluding that we had struck upon some rock ; instead of this we saw the 
monster sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity. Captain 
D’Wolf applied immediately to the pumps to examine whether or not 
the vessel had received any damage from the shock, but we found that 
very happily it had escaped entirely uninjured.” 

Now, the Captain D’Wolf here alluded to as commanding the ship in 
question, is a New Englander, who, after a long life of unusual adven- 
tures as a sea-captain, this day resides in the village of Dorchester near 
Boston. I have the honour of being a nephew of his. I have particu- 
larly questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff. He sub- 
stantiates every word. The ship, however, was by no means a large 
one : a Russian craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by my 
uncle after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home. 

In that up-and-down manly book of old-fashioned adventure, so full, 
too, of honest wonders — the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one of ancient 
Dampier’s old chums — I found a little matter set down so like that just 
quoted from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for a 
corroborative example, if such be needed. 

Lionel, it seems, was on his way to “John Eerdinando,” as he calls 
the modern Juan Fernandez. “In our way thither,” he says, “about 
four o’clock in the morning, when we were about one hundred and fifty 
leagues from the Main of America, our ship felt a terrible shock, which 
put our men in such consternation that they could hardly tell where 
they were or what to think; but every one began to prepare for death. 
And, indeed, the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it for 
granted the ship had struck against a rock; but when the amazement 
was a little over, we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no 
ground. . . . The suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their 
carriages, and several of the men were shaken out of their hammocks. 
Captain Davis, who lay with his head on a gun, was thrown out of his 
cabin !” Lionel then goes on to impute the shock to an earthquake, 
and seems to substantiate the imputation by stating that a great earth- 


THE WHITE WHALE wi 

quake, somewhere about that time, did actually do great mischief along 
the Spanish land. But I should not much wonder, if, in the darkness 
of that early hour of the morning, the shock was after all caused by an 
unseen whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath. 

I might proceed with several more examples, one way or another 
known to me, of the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale. 
In more than one instance, he has been known, not only to chase the 
assailing boats hack to their ships, hut to pursue the ship itself, and 
long withstand all the lances hurled at him from its decks. The Eng- 
lish ship Pusie Hall can tell a story on that head; and, as for his 
strength, let me say, that there have been examples where the lines 
attached to a running sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to 
the ship, and secured there; the whale towing her great hull through 
the water, as a. horse walks off with a cart. Again, it is very often 
observed that, if the sperm whale once struck is allowed time to rally, 
he then acts, not so often with blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate de- 
signs of destruction to his pursuers ; nor is it without conveying some 
eloquent indication of his character, that upon being attacked he will 
frequently open his mouth, and retain it in that dread expansion for 
several consecutive minutes. But I must be content with only one 
more and a concluding illustration; a remarkable and most significant 
one, by which you will not fail to see, that not only is the most marvel- 
lous event in this book corroborated by plain facts of the present day, 
but that these marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the 
ages ; so that for the millionth time we say amen with Solomon — Verily 
there is nothing new under the sun. 

In the sixth Christian century lived Procopius, a Christian magis- 
trate of Constantinople, in the days when Justinian was Emperor and 
Belisarius general. As many know, he wrote the history of his own 
times, a work every way of uncommon value. By the best authorities, 
he has always been considered a most trustworthy and unexaggerating 
historian, except in some one or two particulars, not at all affecting the 
matter presently to be mentioned. 

How, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term 
of his prefecture at Constantinople, a great sea-monster was captured in 
the neighbouring Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed 
vessels at intervals in those waters for a period of more than fifty years. 


192 


MOBY DICK; OR 

A fact thus set down in substantial history cannot easily be gainsaid. 
Nor is there any reason it should be. Of what precise species this sea- 
monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed ships, as well as 
for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am strongly in- 
clined to think a sperm whale. And I will tell you why. For a long 
time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always unknown in the 
Mediterranean and the deep waters connected with it. Even now I am 
certain that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be, in the present 
constitution of things, a place for his habitual gregarious resort. But 
further investigations have recently proved to me, that in modern times 
there have been isolated instances of the presence of the sperm whale 
in the Mediterranean. I am told, on good authority, that on the Bar- 
bary coast, a Commodore Davis of the British Navy found the skeleton 
of a sperm whale. Now as a vessel of war readily passes through the 
Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by the same route, pass out 
of the Mediterranean into the Propontis. 

In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar sub- 
stance called brit is to be found, the aliment of the right whale. But 
I have every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale — squid 
or cuttle-fish — lurks at the bottom of that sea, because large creatures, 
but by no means the largest of that sort, have been found at its 
surface. If, then, you properly put these statements together, and 
reason upon them a bit, you will clearly perceive that, according to all 
human reasoning, Procopius’s sea-monster, that for half a century stove 
the ships of a Boman Emperor, must in all probability have been a 
sperm whale. 

CHAPTEK XLV 

SURMISES 

Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his 
thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate capture of Moby 
Dick; though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that 
one passion ; nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature and 
long habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman’s ways, altogether 
to abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage; or at least if this 
were otherwise, there were not wanting other motives much more in- 


193 


THE WHITE WHALE 

fluential with him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even con- 
sidering his monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards the 
White Whale might have possibly extended itself some degree to all 
sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more 
he multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered whale 
would prove to he the hated one he hunted. But if such a hypothesis 
he indeed exceptionable, there were still additional considerations 
which, though not so strictly according with the wildness of his ruling 
passion, yet were by no means incapable of swaying him. 

To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used 
in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order. He 
knew, for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some re- 
spects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the complete 
spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intel- 
lectual mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but 
stand in a sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck’s body and Starbuck’s 
coerced will were Ahab’s, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck’s 
brain ; still he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred 
his captain’s quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself 
from it, or even frustrate it. It might be that a long interval would 
elapse ere the White Whale was seen. During that long interval Star- 
buck would ever be apt to fall into open relapse of rebellion against his 
captain’s leadership, unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial 
influences were brought to bear upon him. Hot only that, but the 
subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more signif- 
icantly manifested than in his superlative sense and shrewdness in fore- 
seeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of 
that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it; that 
the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure 
background (for few men’s courage is proof against protracted medita- 
tion unrelieved by action) ; that when they stood their long night 
watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of 
than Moby Dick. For however eagerly and impetuously the savage 
crew had hailed the announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all 
sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable — they live in the vary- 
ing outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness — and when retained 
for any object remote and blank in the pursuit, however promissory of 


194 


MOBY DICK; OR 

life and passion in the end, it is above all things requisite that tempo- 
rary interests and employments should intervene and hold them health- 
ily suspended for the final dash. 

Nor was Aliah unmindful of another thing. In times of strong emo- 
tion mankind disdain all base considerations ; but such times are evanes- 
cent. The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured 
man, thought Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale 
fully incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their 
savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, 
still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must 
also have food for their more common, daily appetites. For even the 
high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to 
traverse two thousand miles of land to fight for their holy sepulchre, 
without committing burglaries, picking pockets, and gaining other pious 
perquisites by the way, Had they been strictly held to their one final 
and romantic object — that final and romantic object, too many would 
have turned from in disgust. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, 
of all hopes of cash — ay, cash. They may scorn cash now ; but let some 
months go by, and no perspective promise of it to them, and then this 
same quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same cash would 
soon cashier Ahab. 

Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more re- 
lated to Ahab personally. Having impulsively, it is probable, and per- 
haps somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private purpose of 
the Pe quod^s voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing, 
he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of usur- 
pation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal, his crew if 
so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all further obedi- 
ence to him, and even violently wrest from him the command. From 
even the barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible con- 
sequences of such a suppressed impression gaining ground, Ahab must 
of course have been most anxious to protect himself. That protection 
could only consist in his own predominating brain and heart and hand, 
backed by a heedful, closely calculating attention to every minute at- 
mospheric influence which it was possible for his crew to be subjected to. 

For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too analytic to be ver- 
bally developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still in a good de- 


THE WHITE WHALE i»5 

gree continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod’s voy- 
age ; observe all customary usages ; and not only that, but force himself 
to evince all his well-known passionate interest in the general pursuit of 
his profession. 

Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard hailing the three 
mastheads and admonishing them to keep a bright lookout, and not 
omit reporting even a porpoise. This vigilance was not long without 
reward. 


CHAPTER XLVI 

THE' MAT-MAKE® 

It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging 
about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters. 
Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword- 
mat, for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and 
yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of 
reverie lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his 
own invisible self. 

I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As 
I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the 
long yarns of the warps, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as 
Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword 
between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly 
and unthinkingly drove home every yarn : I say so strange a dreaminess 
did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken 
by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this 
were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically 
weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads 
of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vi- 
bration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise 
interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed neces- 
sity; and here, thought I, with my own hand, I ply my own shuttle 
and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, 
Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof 
slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be ; 


196 


MOBY DICK; OR 

and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding 
contrast in tbe final aspect of the completed fabric ; this savage’s sword, 
thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof ; 
this easy indifferent sword must be chance — ay, chance, freewill, and 
necessity— nowise incompatible — all interweavingly working together. 
The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate 
course — its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; 
freewill still free to ply her shuttle between given threads ; and chance, 
though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and 
sideways in its motions modified by freewill, though thus prescribed to 
by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow 
at events. 

Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound 
so strange, long-drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball 
of freewill dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds 
whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees 
was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly 
forward, his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden inter- 
vals he continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very 
moment perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whale- 
men’s lookouts perched as high in the air ; but from few of those lungs 
could that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence 
as from Tashtego the Indian’s. 

As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and 
eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him 
some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild 
cries announcing their coming. 

“There she blows ! there ! there ! there ! she blows ! she blows !” 

“Where-away ?” 

“On the lee-beam, about two miles off ! a school of them !” 

Instantly all was commotion. 

The sperm whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating 
and reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish 
from other tribes of his genus. 

“There go flukes !” was now the cry from Tashtego ; and the whales 
disappeared. 


197 


THE WHITE WHALE 

“Quick, steward !” cried Ahab. “Time ! time !” 

Dough-Boy hurried .below, glanced at the watch, and reported the 
exact minute to Ahab. 

The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently 
rolling before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down 
heading to leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in 
advance of our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the 
sperm whale when, sounding with his head in one direction, he never- 
theless, while concealed beneath the surface, mills round, and swiftly 
swims off in the opposite quarter — this deceitfulness of his could not 
now be in action ; for there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen 
Tashtego had been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our 
vicinity. One of the men selected for shipkeepers — that is, those not 
appointed to the boats, by this time relieved the Indian at the mainmast 
head. The sailors at the fore and mizzen had come down ; the line tubs 
were fixed in their places; the cranes were thrust out; the mainyard 
was backed, and the three boats swung over the sea like three samphire 
baskets over high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews 
with one hand clung to the rail, while one foot was expectantly poised 
on the gunwale. So look the long line of man-of-war’s men about to 
throw themselves on board an enemy’s ship. 

But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took 
every eye from the whale. With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who 
was surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out 
of air. 


CHAPTER XLYII 

THE FIRST LOWERING 

The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side of 
the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting loose the tackles 
and bands of the boat which swung there. This boat had always been 
deemed one of the spare boats, though technically called the captain’s, 
on account of its hanging from the starboard quarter. The figure that 
now stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white tooth evilly 
protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese jacket of black 


198 


MOBY DICK; OR 

cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trousers of the same 
dark stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a glistening 
white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled round and 
round upon his head. Less swart in aspect, the companions of this 
figure were of that vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of 
the aboriginal natives of the Manillas; — a race notorious for a certain 
diabolism of subtilty, and by some honest white mariners supposed to 
he the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil, 
their lord, whose counting-room they suppose to he elsewhere. 

While yet the wondering ship’s company were gazing upon these 
strangers, Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned old man at their head, 
“All ready there, Fedallah?” 

“Ready,” was the half-hissed reply. 

“Lower away then; d’ye hear?” shouting across the deck. “Lower 
away there, I say.” 

Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their amazement the 
men sprang over the rail ; the sheaves whirled round in the blocks ; with 
a wallow, the three boats dropped into the sea ; while, with a dexterous, 
off-handed daring, unknown in any other vocation, the sailors, goat-like, 
leaped down the rolling ship’s side into the tossed boats below. 

Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship’s lee, when a fourth 
keel, coming from the windward side pulled round under the stern, and 
showed the five strangers rowing Ahab, who standing erect in the stern, 
loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread themselves widely, 
so as to cover a large expanse of water. But with all their eyes again 
riveted upon the swart Fedallah and his crew, the inmates of the other 
boats obeyed not the command. 

“Captain Ahab ? ” said Starbuck. 

“Spread yourselves,” cried Ahab; “give way, all four boats. Thou, 
Flask, pull out more to leeward!” 

“Ay, ay, sir,” cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round his 
great steering oar. “Lay back!” addressing his crew. “There! — 
there ! — there again ! There she blows 'right ahead, boys ! — lay back ! 
Hever heed yonder yellow boys, Archy.” 

“Oh, I don’t mind ’em, sir,” said Archy ; “I knew it all before now. 
Didn’t I hear ’em in the hold ? And didn’t I tell Cabaco here of it ? 
What say ye, Cabaco ? They are stowaways, Mr. Flask.” 


THE WHITE WHALE i»» 

“Pull, pull, my fine hearts alive; pull, my children; pull, my little 
ones/’ drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew, some of 
whom still showed signs of uneasiness. “Why don’t you break your 
backbones, my boys ? What is it you stare at ? Those chaps in yonder 
boats ? Tut ! They are only five more hands come to help us — never 
mind from where — the more the merrier. Pull, then, do pull: never 
mind the brimstone — devils are good fellows enough. So, so; there 
you are now ; that’s the stroke for a thousand pounds ; that’s the stroke 
to sweep the stakes ! Hurrah for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes ! 
Three cheers, men — all hearts alive ! Easy, easy ; don’t be in a hurry — 
don’t be in a hurry. Why don’t you snap your oars, you rascals ? Bite 
something, you dogs ! So, so, so, then ; — softly, softly ! That’s it — 
that’s it ! long and strong. Give way there, give way ! The devil fetch 
ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye 
sleepers, and pull. Pull, will ye ? pull, can’t ye ? pull, won’t ye ? Why 
in the name of gudgeons and ginger-cakes don’t ye pull? — pull and 
break something ! pull, and start your eyes out ! Here !” whipping out 
the sharp knife from his girdle; “every mother’s son of ye draw his 
knife, and pull with the blade between his teeth. That’s it — that’s it. 
How ye do something; that looks like it, my steel-bits. Start her — 
start her, my silver spoons ! Start her, marling-spikes !” 

Stubb’s exordium to his crew is given here at large, because he had 
rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general, and especially in 
inculcating the religion of rowing. But you must not suppose from 
this specimen of his sermonisings that he ever flew into downright 
passions with his congregation. Hot at all; and therein consisted his 
chief peculiarity. He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in 
a tone so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed 
so calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear 
such queer invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling 
for the mere joke of the thing. Besides he all the time looked so easy 
and indolent himself, so loungingly managed his steering oar, and so 
broadly gaped — open-mouthed at times — that the mere sight of such a 
yawning commander, by sheer force of contrast, acted like a charm upon 
the crew. Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort of humorists, 
whose jollity is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put all inferiors 
on their guard in the matter of obeying them. 


200 


MOBY DICK; OR 

In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely 
across Stubb’s bow; and when for a minute or so the two boats were 
pretty near to each other, Stubb hailed the mate. 

“Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir, if 
ye please!” 

“Holloa !” returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch as he 
spoke ; still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew ; his face set like 
a flint from Stubb’s. 

“What think ye of those yellow boys, sir ?” 

“Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed. (Strong, 
strong boys !” in a whisper to his crew, then speaking out loud again) 
“A sad business, Mr. Stubb! (seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but 
never mind, Mr. Stubb, all for the best. Let all your crew pull strong, 
come what will. (Spring, my men, spring!) There’s hogsheads of 
sperm ahead, Mr. Stubb, and that’s what ye came for. (Pull, my 
boys!) Sperm, sperm’s the play! This at least is duty; duty and 
profit hand in hand !” 

“Ay, ay, I thought as much,” soliloquised Stubb, when the boats 
diverged, “as soon as I clapt eye on ’em, I thought so. Ay, and that’s 
what he went into the after-hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy long sus- 
pected. They were hidden down there. The White Whale’s at the 
bottom of it. Well, well, so be it! Can’t be helped! All right! 
Give way, men ! It ain’t the White Whale today ! Give way !” 

How the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical in- 
stant as the lowering of the boat from the deck, this had not unreason- 
ably awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in some of the ship’s 
company; but Archy’s fancied discovery having some time, previous 
got abroad among them, though indeed not credited then, this had 
in some small measure prepared them for the event. It took off the 
extreme edge of their wonder; and so what with all this and Stubb’s 
confident way of accounting for their appearance, they were for the 
time freed from superstitious surmisings; though the affair still left 
abundant room for all manner of wild conjectures as to dark Ahab’s 
precise agency in the matter from the beginning. Eor me, I silently 
recalled the mysterious shadows I had seen creeping on board the 
Pequod during the dim Hantucket dawn, as well as the enigmatical 
hintings of the unaccountable Elijah. 


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201 


THE WHITE WHALE 

Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the 
furthest to windward, was still ranging ahead of the other boats; a 
circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him. Those 
tiger-yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like five 
trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular strokes of strength, which 
periodically started the boat along the water like a horizontal burst 
boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen 
pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and 
displayed his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the 
gunwale, clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery 
horizon; while at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like 
a fencer’s thrown half backward into the air, as if to counterbalance 
any tendency to trip; Ahab was seen steadily managing his steering 
oar as in a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn 
him. All at once the outstretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then 
remained fixed, while the boat’s five oars were seen simultaneously 
peaked. Boat and crew sat motionless on the sea. Instantly the three 
spread boats in the rear paused on their way. The whales had irregu- 
larly settled bodily down into the blue, thus giving no distantly dis- 
cernible token of the movement, though from his closer vicinity Ahab 
had observed it. 

“Every man look out along his oars!” cried Starbuck. “Thou, 
Queequeg, stand up!” 

Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in the bow, the 
savage stood erect there, and with intensely eager eyes gazed off towards 
the spot where the chase had last been descried. Likewise upon the ex- 
treme stern of the boat where it was also triangularly platformed level 
with the gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen coolly and adroitly bal- 
ancing himself to the jerking tossings of his chip of a craft, and silently 
eyeing the vast blue eye of the sea. 

Not very far distant Flask’s boat was also lying breathlessly still; 
its commander recklessly standing upon 'the top of the loggerhead, a 
stout sort of post rooted in the keel, and rising some two feet above 
the level of the stern platform. It is used for catching turns with 
the whale-line. Its stop is not more spacious than the palm of a man’s 
hand, and standing upon such a base as that, Flask seemed perched 
at the masthead of some ship which had sunk to all but her trucks. 


202 


MOBY DICK; OR 

But little King-Post was small and short, and at the same time little 
King-Post was full of a large and tall ambition, so that this loggerhead 
standpoint of his did by no means satisfy King-Post. 

“I can’t see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let me on 
to that.” 

Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady 
his way, swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his 
lofty shoulders for a pedestal. 

“Good a masthead as any, sir. Will you mount ?” 

“That I will and thank ye very much, my fine fellow; only I wish 
you fifty feet taller.” 

Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks 
of the boat, the gigantic negro, stooping a little, presented his flat palm 
to Flask’s foot, and then putting Fl'ask’s hand on his hearse-plumed 
head and bidding him spring as he himself should toss, with one dex- 
terous fling landed the little man high and dry on his shoulders. And 
here was Flask now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm furnishing 
him with a breastband to lean against and steady himself by. 

At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what wondrous 
habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect 
posture in his boat, even when pitched about by the most riotously 
perverse and cross-running seas; still more strange to see him giddily 
perched upon the loggerhead itself, under such circumstances. But 
the sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more 
curious ; for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy unthought 
of barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmo- 
niously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask 
seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looker nobler than the rider. Though 
truly vivacious, tumultuous ostentatious little Flask would now and 
then stamp with impatience; but not one added heave did he thereby 
give to the negro’s lordly chest. So have I seen Passion and Vanity 
stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter 
her tides and her seasons for that. 

Meanwhile Stubb, the second mate, betrayed no such far-gazing solic- 
itudes. The whales might have made one of their regular sound- 
ings, not a temporary dive from mere fright ; and if that were the case, 
Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace the 


THE WHITE WHALE 


203 


languishing interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from his hatband, 
where he always wore it aslant like a feather. He ldaded it, and 
rammed home the loading with his thumb-end; hut hardly had he 
ignited his match across the rough sandpaper of his hand, when Tash- 
tego, his harpooneer, whose eyes had been setting to windward like two 
fixed stars, suddenly dropped like light from his erect attitude to his 
seat, crying out in a quick frenzy of hurry, “Down, down all, and give 
way ! — there they are !” 

To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been 
visible at that moment ; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white 
water, and thin scattered puffs of vapour hovering over it, and suffus- 
ingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white rolling 
billows. The air around suddenly vibrated — and tingled, as it 
were — like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this 
atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of 
water, also, the whales were swimming. Seen in advance of all the 
other indications, the puffs of vapour they spouted seemed their forerun- 
ning couriers and detached flying outriders. 

All four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled 
water and air. But it b’ade fair to outstrip them; it flew on and on, 
as a mass of interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the 
hills. 

“Pull, pull, my good boys,” said Starbuck, in the lowest possible but 
intensest concentrated whisper to his men ; while the sharp fixed glance 
from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two 
visible needles in two unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say 
much to his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything to him ; only the 
silence of the boat was at intervals startlingly pierced by one of his 
peculiar whispers, now harsh with command, now soft with entreaty. 

How different the loud little King-Post. “Sing out and say some- 
thing, my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts ! Beach me, beach 
me on their black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I’ll sign 
over to you my Martha’s Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife, 
and children, boys. Lay me on — lay me on! 0 Lord, Lord! but 
I shall go stark, staring mad! See! see that white water!” And 
so shouting, he pulled his hat from his head, and stamped up and 
down on it ; then picking it up, flirted it far off upon the sea ; and finally 


204 MOBY DICK; OR 

fell to rearing and plunging in the boat’s stern like a crazed colt 
from the prairie. 

“Look at that chap, now,” philosophically drawled Stubb, who, 
with his unlighted short pipe, mechanically retained between his 
teeth, at a short distance, followed after — “He’s got fits, that Flask 
has. Fits ? yes, give him fits — that’s the very word — pitch fits into 
’em. Merrily, merrily, heart’s alive. Pudding for supper, you 
know; — merry’s the word. Pull, babes — pull, sucklings — pull, all. 
But what the devil are you hurrying about ? Softly, softly, and 
steadily, my men. Only pull, and keep pulling; nothing more. Crack 
all your backbones, and bite your knives in two — that’s all. Take 
it easy — why don’t ye take it easy, I say, and burst all your livers 
and lungs !” 

But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow 
crew of his — 'these were words best omitted here; for you live under 
the blessed light of the evangelical land. Only the infidel sharks 
in the audacious- seas may give ear to such words, when, with tornado 
brow, and eyes of red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped 
after his prey. 

Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions 
of Flask to “that whale,” as he called the fictitious monster which 
he declared to be incessantly tantalising his boat’s bow with his tail — 
these allusions of his were at times so vivid and lifelife, that they 
would cause some one or two of his men to snatch a fearful look over 
the shoulder. But this was against all rule; for the oarsmen must 
put out their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks; usage pro- 
nouncing that they must have no organs but ears, and no limbs but 
arms, in these critical moments. 

It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe ! The vast swells of 
the omnipotent sea ; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled 
along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling- 
green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an 
instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost 
seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into 
the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to 
gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down 
its other side; — all these, with the cries of the headsmen and har- 


THE WHITE WHALE 


205 


pooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous 
sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her- boats with out- 
stretched sails*, like a wild hen after her screaming brood; all this 
was thrilling. Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of 
his wife into the fever heat of his first battle; not the dead man’s 
ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world; — 
neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than that man 
does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into the charmed, 
churned circle of the hunted sperm whale. 

The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming 
more and more visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun 
cloud-shadows flung upon the sea. The jets of vapour no longer 
blended, hut tilted everywhere to right and left; the whales seemed 
separating their wakes. The boats were pulled more apart; Star- 
buck giving chase to three whales running dead to leeward. Our 
sail was now set, and, with the still rising wind, we rushed along; 
the boat going with such madness through the water, that the lee 
oars could scarcely he worked rapidly enough to escape being tom 
from the rowlocks. 

Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist ; neither 
ship nor boat to he seen. 

“Give way, men,” whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft 
the sheet of his sail; “there is time to kill fish yet before the squall 
comes. There’s white water again ! — -close to ! Spring !” 

Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted 
that the other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, 
when with a lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck sai ! d: “Stand 
up!” and Queequeg, harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet. 

Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death 
peril so close to them ahead, yet with their eyes on the intense 
countenance of the mate in the stem of the boat, they knew that the 
imminent instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing 
sound as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the 
boat was still booming through the mist, the waves curling and hissing 
around us like the erected crests of enraged serpents. 

“That’s his hump. There, there, give it to him!” whispered Star- 
buck. 


206 


MOBY DICK; OR 

A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted 
iron of Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an in- 
visible push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on 
a ledge; the sail collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapour 
shot up near by; something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake 
beneath us. The whole crew were half suffocated as they were tossed 
helter-skelter into the white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, 
whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale, merely 
grazed by the iron, escaped. 

Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swim- 
ming round it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across 
the gunwale, tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our 
knees in the sea, the water covering every rib and plank, so that 
to our downward gazing eyes the suspended craft seemed a coral 
boat grown up to us from the bottom of the ocean. 

The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers 
together; the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us 
like a white fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were 
burning; immortal in these jaws of death! In vain we hailed the 
other boats; as well roar to the live coals down the chimney of a 
flaming furnace as hail those boats in that storm. Meanwhile the 
driving scud, rack, and mist, grew darker with the shadows of night; 
no sign, of the ship could be seen. The rising sea forbade all attempts 
to bale out the boat. The oars were useless as propellers, performing 
now the office of life-preservers. So, cutting the lashing of the water- 
proof match-keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite 
the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed 
it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, 
then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that 
almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a 
man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair. 

Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or 
boat, we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on. The mist still 
spread over the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom of 
the boat. Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand 
to his ear. We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto 


207 


THE WHITE WHALE 

muffled by the storm. The sound came nearer and nearer; the thick 
mists were dimly parted by a huge vague form. Affrighted, we all 
sprang into the sea as the ship at last loomed into view, hearing 
right down upon us within distance of not much more than its length. 

Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one in- 
stant it tossed and gaped beneath the ship’s bows like a chip at the 
base of a cataract ; and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was 
seen no more till it came up weltering astern. Again we swam for 
it, were dashed against it by the seas, and were at last taken up and 
safely landed on board. Ere the squall came close to, the other boats 
had cut loose from their fish and returned to the ship in good time. 
The ship had given us up, but was still cruising, if haply it might 
light upon some token of our perishing, — an oar or a lance pole. 

CHAPTER XLVIII 

THE HYENA 

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed 
affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast 
practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and 
more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. 
However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. 
He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, 
all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as 
an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. 
And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden dis- 
aster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him 
only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed 
by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of way- 
ward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time 
of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, 
so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most 
momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. There is 
nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort 
of genial, desperado philosophy ; and with it I now regarded this whole 
voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object. 


208 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“Queequeg,” said I when they had dragged me, the last man, to 
the deck, and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the 
water; “Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often 
happen ?” Without much emotion, though soaked through just like 
me, he gave me to understand that such things did often happen. 

“Mr. Stubb,” said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in 
his oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; “Mr. 
Stubb, I think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever 
met, our chief mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and 
prudent. I suppose then, that going plump on a flying whale with 
your sail set in a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman’s dis- 
cretion ?” 

“Certain. I’ve lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale 
off Cape Horn.” 

“Mr. Flask,” said I, turning to little King-Post, who was stand- 
ing close by; “you are experienced in these things, and I am not. 
Will you tell me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. 
Flask, for an oarman to break his own back pulling himself back- 
foremost into death’s jaws?” 

“Can’t you twist that smaller?” said Flask. “Yes, that’s the law. 
I should like to see a boat’s crew backing water up to a whale face 
foremost. Ha, ha ! the whale would give them squint for squint, mind 
that!” 

Here then, from three impartial witnesses^ I had a deliberate state- 
ment of the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and 
capsizings in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were 
matters of common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that 
at the superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I must 
resign my life into the hands of him who steered the boat — oftentimes 
a fellow who at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon the 
point of scuttling the craft with his own frantic stampings; consider- 
ing that the particular disaster to our own particular boat was chiefly to 
he imputed to Starbuck’s driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of 
a squall, and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous 
for his great heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged 
to this uncommonly prudent Starbuck’s boat ; and finally considering 
in what a devil’s chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: 


209 


THE WHITE WHALE 

taking all things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below 
and make a rough draft of my will. “Queequeg,” said I, “come along ; 
you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee.” 

It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at 
their last wills and testaments, hut there are no people in the world 
more fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical 
life that I had done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded 
upon the present occasion, I felt all the easier ; a stone was rolled away 
from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as 
supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case 
might be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up 
in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a 
quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug 
family vault. 

How then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my 
frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and 
the devil fetch the hindmost. 

CHAPTEK XLIX 

ARAB'S BOAT AJ5TD CREW. FEDALLAH 

«Who> would have thought it, Flask!” cried Stubb; “if I had hut 
one leg you would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug- 
hole with my timber toe. Oh ! he’s a wonderful old man !” 

“I don’t think it so strange, after all, on that account,” said Flask. 
“If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing. 
That would disable him; hut he has one knee, and good part of the 
other left, you know.” 

“I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.” 

Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, con- 
sidering the paramount importance of his life to the success of the 
voyage, it is right for a whaling captain to jeopardise that life in the 
active perils of the chase. So Tamerlane’s soldiers often argued with 
tears in their eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought to be 
carried into the thickest of the fight. 


210 


MOBY DICK; OR 

But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering 
that with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger ; 
considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and ex- 
traordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then 
comprises a peril ; under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed 
man to enter a whaleboat in the hunt? As a general thing, the joint- 
owners of th e-Pequod must have plainly thought not. 

Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little 
of his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes 
of the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving 
his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat, actually 
apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt — above all for 
Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boat’s 
crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads 
of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat’s 
crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head. 
Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own touching all 
that matter. Until Cabaco’s published discovery, the sailors had little 
foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little while out of 
port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the 
whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and 
then found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with 
his own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and 
even solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the line 
is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this 
was observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra 
coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better 
withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety 
he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is 
sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat’s bow for bracing the 
knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale ; when it was observed 
how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the 
semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter’s chisel 
gouged out a little here and straightened it a little there; all these 
things, I say, had awakened much interest and curiosity at the time. 
But almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative heed- 
fulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby 


THE WHITE WHALE 211 

Dick; for he had already revealed his intention to hunt that mortal 
monster in person. But such a supposition did by no means involve 
the remotest suspicion as to any boat’s crew being assigned to that boat. 

Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon 
waned away ; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and 
then such unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from 
the unknown nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating 
outlaws of whalers ; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer 
castaway creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, hits 
of wreck, oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what 
not; that Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down 
into the cabin to chat with the captain, and it would not create any 
unsubduable excitement in the forecastle. 

But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate 
phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it 
were somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Bedallah re- 
mained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly 
world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced him- 
self to be linked with Ahab’s peculiar fortunes ; nay, so far as to have 
some sort of a half-hinted influence ; Heaven knows, but it might have 
been even authority over him; all this none knew. But one cannot 
sustain an indifferent air cencerning Bedallah. He was such a creature 
as civilised, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their 
dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide 
among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles 
to the east of the continent — these insulated, immemorial, unalterable 
countries, which even in these modem days still preserve much of the 
ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations, when the mem- 
ory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his 
descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real 
phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created 
and to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels 
indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the 
uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours. 


212 


MOBY DICK; OR 

CHAPTER L 


THE SPIBIT-SPOUT 

Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly 
swept across four several cruising-grounds ; that off the Azores; off the 
Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the 
Rio de la Plata ; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality, 
southerly from St. Plelena. 

It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and 
moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; 
and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery 
silence, not a solitude; on such 'a silent night a silvery jet was seen 
far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, 
it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising 
from the sea. Eedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight 
nights, it was his wont to mount to the mainmast head, and stand a 
lookout there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And 
yet, though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in 
a hundred would venture a lowering for them. You may think with 
what emotions, then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft 
at such unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one 
sky. But when, after spending his uniform interval there for several 
successive nights without uttering a single sound; when, after all this 
silence, his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moonlit 
jet, every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit 
had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. “There she 
blows !” Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have 
quivered more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For 
though it was a most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and 
so deliriously exciting, that almost every soul on hoard instinctively de- 
sired a lowering. 

Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded 
the t’gallant sails and royals to he set, and every stunsail spread. The 
best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every masthead 
manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange, 
upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so 


213 


THE WHITE WHALE 

many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath 
the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences 
were struggling in her — one to mount direct to heaven, the other to 
drive yawningly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab’s 
face that night, you would have thought, that in him also two different 
things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along 
the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On 
life and death this old man walked. But though the ship so swiftly 
sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet 
the silvery jet was no more seen that night. Every sailor swore he saw 
it once, but not a second time. 

This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some 
days after, lo ! at the same silent hour, it was again announced : again 
it was descried by all ; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more 
it disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after 
night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously jetted 
into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be ; disappear- 
ing again for one whole day, or two days or three ; and somehow seem- 
ing at every distinct repetition to be advancing still further and further 
in our van, this solitary jet seemed for ever alluring us on. 

Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accord- 
ance with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things in- 
vested the Pequod , were there wanting some of the seamen who swore 
that whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in 
however far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was 
cast by one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, 
there reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, 
as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the 
monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest 
and most savage seas. 

These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a 
wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in 
which, beneath all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devil- 
ish charm, as for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so 
wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful 
errand, seemed vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow. 

But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began 


214 


MOBY DICK; OR 

howling around ns, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas 
that are there ; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, 
and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver 
chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks ; then all this desolate 
vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than 
before. 

Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and 
thither before us ; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. 
And every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen ; 
and spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp, 
as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a 
thing appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their 
homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the 
black sea, as if its vast tides were u conscience ; and the great mundane 
soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had 
bred. 

Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoto, as 
called of yore; for long allured by the perfidious silences that before 
had attended us, we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea, 
where guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed 
condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, 
or beat that black air without any horizon. But calm, snow-white, and 
unvarying ; still directing its fountain of feathers to the sky ; still beck- 
oning us on from before, the solitary jet would at times be descried. 

During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for 
the time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous 
deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever 
addressed his mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything 
above and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively 
to await the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practi- 
cal fatalists. So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, 
and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours 
would stand gazing dead to windward, while an occasional squall of 
sleet or snow would all but congeal his very eyelashes together. Mean- 
time, the crew driven from the forward part of the ship by the perilous 
seas that burstingly broke over its bows, stood in a line along the bul- 
warks in the waist ; and the better to guard against the leaping waves, 


THE WHITE WHALE 215 

each man had slipped himself into a sort of bowline secured to the rail, 
in which he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or no words were spoken ; 
and the silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax, day after day 
tore on through all the swift madness and gladness of the demoniac 
waves. By night the same muteness of humanity before the shrieks of 
the ocean prevailed ; still in silence the men swung in the bowlines ; still 
wordless Ahab stood up to the blast. Even when wearied nature seemed 
demanding repose he would not seek that repose in his hammock. Never 
could Starbuck forget the old man’s aspect, when one night going down 
into the cabin to mark how the barometer stood, he saw him with 
closed eyes sitting straight in his floor-screwed chair ; the rain and half- 
melted sleet of the storm from which he had some time before emerged, 
still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and coat. On the table 
beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides and currents which 
have previously been spoken of. His lantern swung from his tightly 
clenched hand. Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back 
so that the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale 
that swung from a beam in the ceiling . 1 

“Terrible old man!” thought Starbuck with a shudder; “sleeping in 
this gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.” 

CHAPTEB LI 

THE ALBATROSS 

South-eastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts, a good cruis- 
ing ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Alba- 
tross) by name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the 
foremast head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro 
in the far ocean fisheries — a whaler at sea, and long absent from home. 

As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the^ 
skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral ap- 
pearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all her 
spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over 

1 The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without going to the 
compass at the helm, the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the 
course of the ship. 


216 


MOBY DICK; OR 

with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was 
to see her long-bearded lookouts at those three mastheads. They seemed 
clad in the skins of beasts, so tom and bepatched the raiment that had 
survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed 
to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea ; and though, 
when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the 
air came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from 
the mastheads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-look- 
ing fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to 
our own lookouts, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from be- 
low. 

“Ship ahoy ! Have ye seen the White Whale V ’ 

But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in 
the act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his 
hand into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove 
to make himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still increas- 
ing the distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of 
the Pequod were evincing their observance of this ominous incident 
at the first mere mention of the White Whale’s name to another ship, 
Ahab for a moment paused ; it almost seemed as though he would have 
lowered a boat to board the stranger, had not the threatening wind 
forbade. But taking advantage of his windward position, he again 
seized his trumpet, and knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel 
was a Nantucketer and shortly bound home, he loudly hailed — “Ahoy 
there! This is the Pequod , hound round the world! Tell them to 
address all future letters to the Pacific Ocean! and this time three 
years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them to ” 

At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, 
then, in accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless 
fish, that for some days before had been placidly swimming by our 
side, darted away with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged them- 
selves, fore and aft with the stranger’s flanks. Though in the course 
of his continual voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a simi- 
lar sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously 
carry meanings. 

“Swim away from me, do ye?” murmured Ahab, gazing over into 
the water. There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed 


THE WHITE WHALE 217 

more of deep helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before 
evinced. But turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding 
the ship in the wind to diminish her headway, he cried out in his 
old lion voice, — “Up helm! Keep her off round the world!” 

Bound the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud 
feelings ; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct ? Only 
through numberless perils to the very pgint whence we started, where 
those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us. 

Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could 
for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange 
than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise 
in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, 
or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, 
swims before all human hearts — while chasing such over this round 
globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us 
whelmed. 


CHAPTEB LII 

THE GAM 

The ostensible reason why Ahah did not go on hoard of the whaler 
we had spoken was this: the wind and sea betokened storms. But 
even had this not been the case, he would not after all, perhaps, have 
boarded her — judging by his subsequent conduct on similar occasions 
— if so it had been that, by the process of hailing, he had obtained 
a negative answer to the question he put. Bor, as it eventually turned 
out, he cared not to consort, even for five minutes, with any stranger 
captain, except he could contribute some of that information he so 
absorbingly sought. But all this might remain inadequately estimated, 
w r ere not something said here of the peculiar usages of whaling vessels 
when meeting each other in foreign seas, and especially on a common 
cruising-ground. 

If two strangers crossing the Pine Barrens in Kew York State, or 
the equally desolate Salisbury Plain in England ; if casually encounter- 
ing each other in such inhospitable wilds, these twain, for the life of 


218 


MOBY DICK; OR 

them, cannot well avoid a mutual salutation ; and stopping for a moment 
to interchange the news; and, perhaps, sitting down for a while and 
resting in consort : then, how much more natural that upon the illimi- 
table Pine Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea, two whaling vessels 
descrying each other at the ends of the earth — off lone Panning’s Island, 
or the far-away King’s Mills; how much more natural, I say, that 
under such circumstances these ships should not only interchange hails, 
but come into still closer, more friendly and sociable contact. And 
especially would this seem to be a matter of course, in the case of vessels 
owned in one seaport, and whose captains, officers, and not a few of 
the men are personally known to each other; and consequently, have 
all sorts of dear domestic things to talk about. 

Por the long absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters 
on board; at any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of 
a date a year or two later than the last one on her blurred and thumb- 
worn files. And in return for that courtesy, the outward-bound ship 
would receive the latest whaling intelligence from the cruising-ground 
to which she may he destined, a thing of the utmost importance to her. 
And in degree, all this will -hold true concerning whaling vessels crossing 
each other’s track on the cruising-ground itself, even though they are 
equally long absent from home. Por one of them may have received 
a transfer of letters from some third, and now far remote vessel; and 
some of those letters may he for the people of the ship she now meets. 
Besides, they would exchange the whaling news, and have an agreeable 
chat. For not only would they meet with all the sympathies of sailors, 
but likewise with all the peculiar congenialities arising from a common 
pursuit and mutually shared privations and perils. 

Nor would difference of country make any very essential difference ; 
that is, so long as both parties speak one language, as is the case with 
Americans and English. Though, to be sure, from the small number 
of English whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when 
they do occur there is too apt to be a sort of shyness between them ; for 
your Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not 
fancy that sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides, the English 
whalers sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the 
American whalers; regarding the long, lean Nantucketer, with his 
nondescript provincialisms, as a sort of sea-pe*asant. But where this 


THE WHITE WHALE 219 

superiority in the English whalemen does really consist, it would he 
hard to say, seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more 
whales than all the English, collectively, in ten years. But this is a 
harmless little foible in the English whale-hunters, which the Nantuck- 
eter does not take much to heart ; probably, because he knows that he 
has a few foibles himself. 

So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the sea, the whalers 
have most reason to be sociable — and they are so : whereas, some mer- 
chant ships crossing each other’s wake in the mid-Atlantic, will often- 
times pass on without so much as a single word of recognition, mutually 
cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies in Broad- 
way ; and all the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism upon each 
other’s rig. As for men-of-war, when they chance to meet at sea, they 
first go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such a 
ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to he much right-down 
hearty goodwill and brotherly love about it at all. As touching slave 
ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry, they run 
away from each other as soon as possible. And as for pirates, when 
they chance to cross each other’s cross-bones, the first hail is — “How 
many skulls ?” — the same way that whalers hail — “How many barrels ?” 
And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for 
they are infernal villains on both sides, and don’t like to see overmuch 
of each other’s villainous likenesses. 

But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable, 
free-and-easy whaler ! What does the whaler do when she meets 
another whaler in any sort of decent weather; she has a “Gam,” a 
thing so utterly unknown to all other ships that they never heard of 
the name even ; and if by chance they should hear of it, they only grin 
at it, and repeat gamesome stuff about “spouters” and “blubber-boilers,” 
and suchlike pretty exclamations. Why is it that all merchant seamen, 
and also all pirates and man-of-war’s men, and slave ship sailors, cherish 
such a scornful feeling towards whale ships ? this is a question it would 
be hard to answer. Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like 
to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory 
about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed ; hut only 
at the gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd 
fashion, he has no proper foundation for his superior altitude. Hence, 


220 


MOBY DICK; OR 

I conclude, that in boasting himself to he high lifted above a whaleman, 
in that assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on. 

But what is a Gam? You might wear out your index-finger running 
up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. 
Dr. Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster’s ark 
does not hold it. Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for 
many years been in constant use among some fifteen thousand true born 
Yankees. Certainly, it needs a definition, and should be incorporated 
into the Lexicon. With that view, let me learnedly define it. 

GAM. Noun — A social meeting of two ( or more) whale ships , 
generally on a cruising-ground ; when , after exchanging hails , they ex- 
change visits by boats' crews; the two captains remaining , for the time, 
on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other . 

There is another little item about Gamming which must not be 
forgotten here. All professions have their own little peculiarities of 
detail ; so has the whale-fishery. In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave ship, 
when the captain is rowed anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the 
stern sheets on a comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat there, and often 
steers himself with a pretty little milliner’s tiller decorated with gay 
cords and ribbons. But the whale boat has no seat astern, no sofa 
of that sort whatever, and no tiller at all. High times indeed, if whal- 
ing captains were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty old 
aldermen in patent chairs. And as for a tiller, the whale boat never 
admits of any such effeminacy ; and therefore as in gamming a complete 
boat’s crew must leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or har- 
pooneer is of the number, that subordinate is the steersman upon the 
occasion, and the captain, having no place to sit in, is -pulled off to his 
visit all standing like a pine tree. And often you will notice that being 
conscious of the eyes of the whole visible world resting on him from 
the sides of the two ships, this standing captain is all alive to the 
importance of sustaining his dignity by maintaining his legs. Nor is 
this any very easy matter; for in his rear is the immense projecting 
steering-oar hitting him now and then in the small of his back, the 
after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front. He is thus 
completely wedged before and behind, and can only expand himself 
sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but a sudden, vio- 
lent pitch of the boat will often go far to topple him, because length 


221 


THE WHITE WHALE 

of foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make 
a spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, 
again, it would never do in plain sight of the world’s riveted eyes, it 
would never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying 
himself the slightest particle by catching hold of anything with his 
hands. Indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he gen- 
eraly carries his hands in his trousers’ pockets; hut perhaps being 
generally very large, heavy hands, he carries them there for ballast. 
Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well authenticated ones too, 
where the captain has been known for an uncommonly critical moment 
or two — in a sudden squall, say — to seize hold of the nearest oarsman’s 
hair, and hold on there like grim death. 


CHAPTER LIII 

THE TOWN-HO'S STORY 

(As told at the Golden Inn) 

The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, 
is much like some noted four comers of a great highway, where you 
meet more travellers than in any other part. 

It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another home- 
ward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho , 1 was encountered. She was 
manned almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued 
she gave us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest 
in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of 
the Town-Ho’s story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale 
a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so-called judg- 
ments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. This 
latter circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming 
what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, 
never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates. Eor that secret 
part of the story was unknown to the Captain of the Town-Ho himself.* 
It was the private property of three confederate white seamen of that 

1 The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the masthead, 
still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin. 


222 


MOBY DICK; OR 

ship, one of whom, it seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish 
injunctions of secrecy, but the following night Tashtego rambled in his 
sleep, and revealed so much of it in that way, that when he was 
wakened he could not well withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent 
an influence did this thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who 
came to the full knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call 
it so, were they governed in this matter, that they kept the secret among 
themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod’ s mainmast. 
Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story as 
publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair I now 
proceed to put on lasting record. 

For my humour’s sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once 
narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one 
saint’s eve, smoking upon the thick gilt-tiled piazza of the Golden Inn. 
Of those fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on 
the closer terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they 
occasionally put, and which are duly answered at the time. 

“Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am 
about rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho , Sperm Whaler of 
Nantucket, was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days’ 
sail eastward from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was some- 
where to the northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the 
pumps, according to daily usage, it was observed that she made more 
water in her hold than common. They supposed a sword-fish had 
stabbed her, gentlemen. But the Captain having some unusual reason 
for believing that rare good luck awaited him in those latitudes, and 
therefore being very averse to quit them, and the leak not being then 
considered at all dangerous, though, indeed, they could not find it after 
searching the hold as low down as was possible in rather heavy weather, 
the ship still continued her cruisings, the mariners working at the 
pumps at wide and easy intervals ; but no good luck came ; more days 
went by, and not only was the leak yet undiscovered, but it sensibly 
increased. So much so, that now taking some alarm, the Captain, mak- 
ing all sail, stood away for the nearest harbour among the islands, there 
to have his hull hove out and repaired. 

“Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest 
chance favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by 


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© Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. 


ISHMAEL TELLS THE TOWN'HO S STORY. 


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223 


THE WHITE WHALE 

the way, because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically re- 
lieved at them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the ship 
free ; never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, well-nigh 
the whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes, the 
Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port 
without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the 
brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly 
provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from 
Buffalo. 

“ ‘Lakeman ! — Buffalo ! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is 
Buffalo V said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass. 

“On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but — I crave your 
courtesy — may be, you shall soon hear further of all that. Now, gen- 
tlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as large 
and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far Manilla ; 
this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet been 
nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly con- 
nected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate, those 
grand fresh-water seas of ours, — Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and 
Superior, and Michigan, — possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with 
many of the ocean’s noblest traits ; with many of its rimmed varieties 
of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic 
isles, even as the Polynesian waters do ; in large part, are shored by two 
great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is ; they furnish long maritime 
approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted 
all round their banks ; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and 
by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the 
fleet thunderings of naval victories ; at intervals, they yield their beaches 
to wild barbarians, whose red-painted faces flash from out their peltry 
wigwams ; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered 
forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic 
genealogies; those same woods harbouring wild Afric beasts of prey, 
and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; 
they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Win- 
nebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the 
armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beach canoe ; they are 


224 


MOBY DICK; OR 

swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the 
salted wave ; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, 
however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all 
its shrieking crew. 

“Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean 
born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as 
any. And for Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him 
down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though 
in after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your con- 
templative Pacific; still was he quite as vengeful and full of social 
quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck- 
horn handled bowie-knives. Yet was this Nantucketer a man with 
some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner who, though a 
sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered 
by that common decency of human recognition which is the meanest 
slave’s right ; thus treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained harm- 
less and docile. At all events, he had proved so thus far ; but Radney 
was doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt — but gentlemen, you shall 
hear. 

“It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing 
her prow for her island haven, that the Town-Ho’s leak seemed again 
increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps 
every day. You must know that in a settled and civilised ocean like 
our Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of pumping their 
whole way across it ; though of a still, sleepy night, should the officer 
of the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the probability 
would be that he and his shipmates would never again remember it, 
on account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom*. Nor in the 
solitary and savage seas far from you to the westward, gentlemen, is it 
altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging at their pump-handles' 
in full chorus even for a voyage of considerable length; that is, if it 
lie along tolerably accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat 
is offered them. It is only when a leaky vessel is in some very out-of- 
the-way part of those waters, some really landless latitude, that her 
captain begins to feel a little anxious. 

“Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak 
was found gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern 


225 


THE WHITE WHALE 

manifested by several of her company; especially by Radney the mate. 
He commanded the upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, 
and every way expanded to the breeze. ,How this Radney, I suppose, 
was as little of a coward, and as little inclined to any sort of nervous 
apprehensiveness touching his own person as any fearless, unthinking 
creature on land or on sea that you can conveniently imagine, gen- 
tlemen. Therefore when he betrayed this solicitude about the safety 
of the ship, some of the seamen declared that it was only on account 
of his being a part owner in her. So when they were working that 
evening at the pumps, there was on this head no small gamesomeness 
slyly going on among them, as they stood with their feet continually 
overflowed by the rippling clear water ; clear as any spring, gentlemen — 
that bubbling from the pumps ran across the deck, 'and poured . itself 
out in steady spouts at the lee scupper-holes. 

“How, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional 
world ©f ours — watery or otherwise — that a person placed in command 
over his fellowmen finds one of them to be very significantly his 
superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man 
he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness ; and if he have a 
chance he will pull down and pulverise that subaltern’s tower, and 
make a little heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may, 
gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a 
head like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasselled hous- 
ings of your last viceroy’s snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, 
and a soul in him, gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, 
had he been bom son to Charlemagne’s father. But Radney, the mate, 
was ngly as a mule ; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious. He did 
not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it. 

“Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with 
the rest, the Lakeman affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on 
with his gay banterings. 

“ ‘Aye, aye, my merry lads, it’s a lively leak this ; hold a cannikin, 
one of ye, and let’s have a taste. By the Lord, it’s worth bottling! 
I’ll tell you what, men, old Rad’s investment must go for it! he had 
best cut away his part of the hull and tow it home. The fact is, boys, 
that sword-fish only began the job; he’s come back again with a gang 
of ship carpenters, saw-fish and file-fish, and what not ; and the whole 


226 


MOBY DICK; OR 

posse of ’em are now hard at work cutting and slashing at the bottom ; 
making improvements, I suppose. If old Rad were here now, I’d tell 
him to jump overboard and scatter ’em. They’re playing the devil 
with his estate, I can tell him. But he’s a simple old soul, — Rad, 
and a beauty too. Boys, they say the rest of his property is in- 
vested in looking-glasses. I wonder if he’d give a poor devil like me 
the model of his nose.’ 

“ 'Damn, your eyes ! what’s that pump stopping for V roared Radney, 
pretending not to have heard the sailor’ talk. ‘Thunder away at it!’ 

“ ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. ‘Lively, boys, 
lively, now !’ And with that the pump clanged like fifty fire-engines ; 
the men tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping of 
the lungs was heard which denotes the fullest tension of life’s utmost 
energies. 

“Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman 
went forward all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his 
face fiery red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from 
his brow. Now what cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed 
Radney to meddle with such a man in that corporeally exasperated 
state, I know not ; hut so it happened. Intolerably striding along the 
deck, the mate commanded him to get a broom and sweep down the 
planks, and also a shovel, and remove some offensive matter consequent 
upon allowing a pig to run at large. 

“Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship’s deck at sea is a piece of house- 
hold work which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended 
to every evening; it has been known to be done in the case of ships 
actually foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility 
of sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of 
whom would not willingly drown without first washing their faces. 
But in all vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the 
boys, if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in 
the TownrHo that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the 
pumps; and being the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had 
been regularly assigned captain of one of the gangs; consequently he 
should have been freed from any trivial business not connected with 
truly nautical duties, such being the case with his comrades. I 


THE WHITE WHALE 227 

mention all these particulars so that you may understand exactly 
how this affair stood between the two men. 

“But there was more than this : the order about the shovel was almost 
as plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had 
spat in his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a whale ship 
will understand this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lake- 
man fully comprehended when the mate uttered his command. But as 
he sat still for a moment, and as he steadfastly looked into the mate’s 
malignant eye and perceived the stacks of powder casks heaped up in 
him and the slow match silently burning along towards them; as he 
instinctively saw all this, that strange forbearance and unwillingness 
to stir up the deeper passionateness in an already ireful being — a 
repugnance most felt, when felt at all, by really valiant men even when 
aggrieved — this nameless phantom feeling, gentlemen, stole over 
Steelkilt. 

“Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a little broken by the bodily 
exhaustion he was temporarily in, he answered him saying that 
sweeping the deck was not his business, and he would do it. And 
then, without at all alluding to the shovel, he pointed to three lads 
as the customary sweepers; who, not being billeted at the pumps, 
had done little or nothing all day. To this, Radney replied with an 
oath, in a most domineering and outrageous manner unconditionally 
reiterating his command; meanwhile advancing upon the still seated 
Lakeman, with an uplifted cooper’s club hammer which he had 
snatched from a cask near by. 

“Heated and irritated as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps, 
for all his first nameless feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt 
could but ill brook this hearing in the mate; but somehow still smoth- 
ering the conflagration within him, without speaking he remained 
doggedly rooted to his seat, till at last the incensed Radney shook the 
hammer within a few inches of his face, furiously commanding him to 
do his bidding. 

“Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily 
followed by the mate with his menacing hammer, deliberately re- 
peated his intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that his forbear- 
ance had not the slightest effect, by an awful and unspeakable intima- 


228 MOBY DICK; OR 

tion with his twisted hand he warned off the foolish and infatuated man ; 
but it was to no purpose. And in this way the two went once slowly 
round the windlass; when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, be- 
thinking him that he had now forborne as much as comported with 
his humour, the Lakeman paused on the hatches and thus spoke to 
the officer : 

“ ‘Mr. Badney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, 
or look to yourself.’ But the predestinated mate coming still closer 
to him, where the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the heavy hammer 
within an inch of his teeth; meanwhile repeating a string of insuffer- 
able maledictions. Entreating not the thousandth part of an inch; 
stabbing him in the eye with the unflinching poniard of his glance, 
Steelkilt, clenching his right hand behind him and creepingly draw- 
ing it back, told his persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek 
he (Steelkilt) would murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool had been 
branded for the slaughter by the gods. Immediately the hammer 
touched the cheek; the next instant the lower jaw of the mate was 
stove in his head ; he fell on the hatch spouting blood like a whale. 

“Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays 
leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing their 
mastheads. They were both Canallers. 

“ ‘Canallers !’ cried Don Pedro. ‘We have seen many whale ships in 
our harbours, but never heard of your Canallers. Pardon; who and 
what are they V 

“Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our Grand Erie 
Canal. You must have heard of it, 

“ ‘Hay, Senor; hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and heredi- 
tary land, we know but little of your vigorous Horth.’ 

“Aye ? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha’s very fine; and 
ere proceeding further I will tell ye what our Canallers are; for such 
information may throw sidelight upon my story. 

“For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire 
breadth of the State of Hew York; through numerous populous cities 
and most thriving villages ; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, 
and affluent, cultivated fields, unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room 
and bar-room; through great forests; on Eoman arches over Indian 


THE WHITE WHALE 229 

rivers ; through sun and shade ; by happy hearts or broken ; through all 
the wide contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk counties; and es- 
pecially, by rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires stand almost like 
mile-stones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly corrupt and 
awful lawless life. There’s your true Ashantee, gentlemen ; there howl 
your pagans ; where you ever find them, next door to you ; under the 
long-flung shadow, and the snug patronising lee of churches. For by 
some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan free- 
booters that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so sinners, 
gentlemen, most abound in holiest vicinities. 

“ ‘Is that a friar passing V said Don Pedro, looking downwards into 
the crowded piazza, with humorous concern. 

“ ‘Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella’s Inquisition wades 
in Lima,’ laughed Don Sebastian. ‘Proceed, Senor.’ 

“ ‘A moment ! Pardon !’ cried another of the company. ‘In the 
name of all us Limees, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that 
we have by no means overlooked your delicacy in not substituting pres- 
ent Lima for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison. Oh! do 
not bow and look surprised ; you know the proverb all along this coast — 
“Corrupt as Lima.” It but bears out your saying, too; churches more 
plentiful than billiard-tables, and for ever open — and “Corrupt as 
Lima.” So, too, Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the 
blessed evangelist, St. Mark! — St. Dominic, purge it! Your cup! 
Thanks: here I refill; now, you pour out again.’ 

“Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would 
make a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is 
he. Like Mark Antony, for days and days along his green-turfed, 
flowery USTile, he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked 
Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore, 
all this effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller 
so proudly sports; his slouched and gaily ribboned hat betoken his 
grand features. A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages 
through which he floats ; his swart visage and bold swagger are not un- 
shunned in cities. Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received 
good turns from one of these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would 
fain be not ungrateful ; but it is often one of the prime redeeming quali- 


230 


MOBY DICK; OR 

ties of jour man of violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm to hack 
a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one. In sum, 
gentlemen, what the wilderness of this canal life is, is emphatically 
evinced by this: that our w T ild whale-fishery contains so many of its 
most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of mankind, except 
Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor 
does it at all diminish the curiousness of this matter, that to many 
thousands of our rural boys and young men born along its line, the 
probationary life of the Grand Canal furnishes the sole transition be- 
tween quietly reaping in a Christian cornfield, and recklessly ploughing 
the waters of the most barbaric seas. 

“‘I see! I see!’ impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his 
chicha upon his silvery ruffles. ‘Ho need to travel ! The world’s one 
Lima. I had thought, now, that at your temperate North the gener- 
ations were cold and holy as the hills. — But the story.’ 

“I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay. 
Hardly had he done so, when he was surrounded by the three junior 
mates and the four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck. 
But sliding down the ropes like baleful comets, the two Canallers 
rushed into the uproar, and sought to drag their man out of it towards 
the forecastle. Others of the sailors joined with them in this attempt, 
and a twisted turmoil ensued; while standing out of harm’s way, 
the valiant Captain danced up and down with a whale-pike, calling 
upon his officers to manhandle that atrocious scoundrel, and smoke 
him along to the quarter-deck. At intervals, he ran close up to the re- 
volving border of the confusion, and prying into the heart of it 
with his pike, sought to prick out the object of his resentment. But 
Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them all; they suc- 
ceeded in gaining the forecastle deck, where, hastily slewing about 
three or four large casks in a line with the windlass, these sea-Parisians 
entrenched themselves behind the barricade. 

“ ‘Come out of that, ye pirates !’ roared the Captain, now menac- 
ing them with a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the 
steward. ‘Come out of that, ye cut-throats !’ 

“Steelkilt leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down 
there, defied the worst the pistols could do; but gave the captain to 


231 


THE WHITE WHALE 

understand distinctly, that his (Steelkilt’s) death would he the signal 
for a murderous mutiny on the part of all hands. Fearing in his 
heart lest this might prove but too true, the Captain a little desisted, 
but still commanded the insurgents instantly to return to their duty. 

“ ‘Will you promise not to touch us, if we do V demanded their 
ringleader. 

“ ‘Turn to! turn to! — I make no promise; — to your duty! Do 
you want to sink the ship, by knocking off at a time like this ? 
Turn to!’ and he once more raised a pistol. 

“ ‘Sink the ship V cried Steelkilt. ‘Aye, let her sink. Not a man 
of us turns to unless you swear not to raise a ropeyam against us. 
What say ye, men V turning to his comrades. A fierce cheer was their 
response. 

“The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping 
his eye on the Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these: — ‘It’s 
not our fault; we didn’t want it; I told him to take his hammer 
away; it was boy’s business; he might have known me before this; I 
told him not to prick the buffalo ; I believe I have broken a finger here 
against his cursed jaw; ain’t those mincing knives down in the fore- 
castle there men ? look to those handspikes, my hearties. Captain, 
by God, look to yourself ; say the word ; don’t be a fool ; forget it all ; 
we are ready to turn to; treat us decently, and we’re your men; 
but we won’t be flogged.’ 

“ ‘Turn to ! I make no promises, turn to, I say !’ 

“ ‘Look ye, now,’ cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards 
him, ‘there are a few of us here (and I am one of them) who have 
shipped for the cruise, d’ye see; now as you well know, sir, we can 
claim our discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don’t want 
a row; it’s not our interest; we want to be peaceful; we are ready 
to work, but we won’t be flogged.’ 

“ ‘Turn to!’ roared the Captain. 

“Steelkilt glanced round him a moment, and then said: — ‘I tell 
you what it is now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung for 
such a shabby rascal, we won’t lift a hand against ye unless ye at- 
tack us; but till you say the word about not flogging us, we don’t 
do a hand’s turn,’ 


232 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“ T>own into the forecastle then, down with ye, I’ll keep ye there 
till ye’re sick of it. Down ye go.’ 

“ ‘Shall we ?’ cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were 
against it; hut at length, in obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded him 
down into their dark den, growlingly disappearing, like bears in a 
cave. 

“As the Lakeman’s hare head was just level with the planks, the 
Captain and his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing over 
the slide of the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon it, and 
loudly called for the steward to bring the heavy brass padlock be- 
longing to the companion-way. Then opening the slide a little, the 
Captain whispered something down the crack, closed it, and turned 
the key upon them — ten in number — leaving on deck some twenty or 
more, who thus far had remained neutral. 

“All night a wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers, for- 
ward and aft, especially about the forecastle scuttle and fore hatch- 
way, at which last place it was feared the insurgents might emerge, 
after breaking through the bulkhead below. But the hours of 
darkness passed in peace ; the men who still remained at their 
duty toiling hard at the pumps, whose clinking and clanking at 
intervals through the dreary night dismally resounded through the 
ship. 

“At sunrise the Captain went forward, and knocking on the deck, 
summoned the prisoners to work; but with a yell they refused. Water 
was then lowered down to them, and a couple of handfuls of biscuit 
were tossed after it; when again turning the key upon them and 
pocketing it, the Captain returned to the quarter-deck. Twice every 
day for three days this was repeated; but on the fourth morning a 
confused wrangling, and then a scuffling was heard, as the customary 
summons was delivered; and suddenly four men burst up from the 
forecastle, saying they were ready to turn to. The fetid closeness of 
the air, and a famishing diet, united perhaps to some fears of ultimate 
retribution, had constrained them to surrender at discretion. Em- 
boldened by this, the Captain reiterated his demand to the rest, but 
Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint to stop his babbling and 
betake himself where he belonged. On the fifth morning three others 


233 


THE WHITE WHALE 

of the mutineers bolted up into the air from the desperate arms 
below that sought to restrain them. Only three were left. 

“ ‘Better turn to now V said the Captain with a heartless jeer. 

“ ‘Shut us up again, will ye!’ cried Steelkilt. 

“ ‘Oh, certainly,’ said the Captain, and the key clicked. 

“It was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection 
of seven of his former associates, and stung by the mocking voice 
that had last hailed him, and maddened by his long emtombment in 
a place as black as the bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt 
proposed to the two Canallers, thus far apparent of one mind with him, 
to burst out of their hole at the next summoning of the garrison; 
and armed with their keen mincing knifes (long, crescentic, heavy 
implements with a handle at each end) run amuck from the bow- 
sprit to the taffrail ; and if by any devilishness of desperation possible, 
seize the ship. For himself, he would do this, he said, whether they 
joined him or not. That was the last night he should spend in that 
den. But the scheme met with no opposition on the part of the other 
two; they swore they were ready for that, or for any other mad thing, 
for anything in short but a surrender. And what was more, they each 
insisted upon being the first man on deck, when the time to make 
the rush should come. But to this their leader as fiercely objected, 
reserving that priority for himself; particularly as his two comrades 
would not yield, the one to the other, in the matter; and both of them 
could not be first, for the ladder would but admit one man at a time. 
And here, gentlemen, the foul play of these miscreants must come out. 

“Upon hearing the frantic project of their leader, each in his own 
separate soul had suddenly lighted, it would seem, upon the same piece 
of treachery, namely; to be foremost in breaking out, in order to 
be the first of the three, though the last of the ten, to surrender; 
and thereby secure whatever small chance of pardon such conduct 
might merit. But when Steelkilt made known his determination still 
to lead them to the last, they in some way, by some subtle chemistry 
of villainy, mixed their before secret treacheries together; and when 
their leader fell into a doze, verbally opened their souls to each other 
in three sentences; and bound the sleeper with cords and gagged him 
with cords, and shrieked out for the Captain at midnight. 


234 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“ Thinking murder at hand, and smelling in the dark for the blood, 
he and all his armed mates and harpooneers rushed for the forecastle. 
In a few minutes the scuttle was opened, and, hound hand and foot, 
the still struggling ringleader was shoved up into the air by his per- 
fidious allies, who at once claimed the honour of securing a man 
who had been fully ripe for murder. But all these were collared, and 
dragged along the deck like dead cattle; and, side by side, were seized 
up into the mizzen rigging, like three quarters of meat, and there 
they hung till morning. ‘Damn ye/ cried the Captain, passing to 
and fro before them, ‘the vultures would not touch ye, ye villains !’ 

“At sunrise he summoned all hands; and separating those who 
had rebelled from those who had taken no part in the mutiny, he 
told the former that he had a good mind to flog them all round — 
thought, upon the whole, he would do so — he ought to — justice de- 
manded it; but for the present, considering their timely surrender, 
he would let them go with a reprimand, which he accordingly admin- 
istered in the vernacular. 

“ ‘But as for you, ye carrion rogues/ turning to the three men in 
the rigging — ‘for you I mean to mince ye up for the twy-pots’; and, 
seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs of the 
two traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their heads 
sideways, as the two crucified thieves are drawn. 

“‘My wrist is sprained with ye!’ he cried, at last; ‘but there is 
still rope enough left for you, my fine bantam, that wouldn’t give up. 
Take that gag from his mouth, and let us hear what he can say 
for himself.’ 

“For a moment the exhausted mutineer made a tremulous motion 
of his cramped jaws, and then painfully twisting round his head, 
said in a sort of hiss, ‘What I say is this — and mind it well — if you 
flog me, I murder you!’ 

“ ‘Say ye so ? then see how ye frightened me’ — and the Captain drew 
off with the rope to strike. 

“ ‘Best not/ hissed the Lakeman. 

“ ‘But I must/ — and the rope was once more drawn back for the 
stroke. 

“Steelkilt here hissed out something, inaudible to all but the Cap- 


THE WHITE WHALE 235 

tain ; who, to the amazement of all hands, started hack, paced the deck 
rapidly two or three times, and then suddenly throwing down his 
rope, said, ‘I won’t do it — let him go — cut him down: d’ye hear?’ 

But as the junior mates were hurrying to execute the order, a pale 
man, with a bandaged head, arrested them — Radney the chief mate. 
Ever since the blow, he had lain in his berth ; hut that morning, hear- 
ing the tumult on the deck, he had crept out, and thus far had 
watched the whole scene. Such was the state of his mouth, that he 
could hardly speak, but mumbling something about his being willing 
and able to do what the Captain dared not attempt, he snatched the 
rope and advanced to his pinioned foe. 

“ ‘You are a coward!’ hissed the Lakeman. 

“ ‘So I am, hut take that.’ The mate was in the very act of strik- 
ing, when another hiss stayed his uplifted arm. He paused: and 
then pausing no more, made good his word, spite of Steelkilt’s threat, 
whatever that might have been. The three men were then cut down, 
all hands were turned to, and, sullenly worked by the moody seamen, 
the iron pumps clanged as before. 

“Just after dark that day, when one watch had retired below, a 
clamour was heard in the forecastle; and the two trembling traitors 
running up, besieged the cabin door, saying they durst not consort 
with the crew. Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could not drive them back, 
so at their own instance they were put down in the ship’s run for 
security. Still, no sign of mutiny reappeared among the rest. On 
the contrary, it seemed, that mainly at Steelkilt’s instigation they had 
resolved to maintain the strictest peacefulness, obey all orders to the 
last, and, when the ship reached port, desert her in a body. But in 
order to insure the speediest end to the voyage, they all agreed to 
another thing — namely, not to sing out for whales, in case any should 
be discovered. For, spite of her leak, and spite of all her other perils, 
the Town-IIo still maintained her mastheads, and her Captain* was 
just as willing to lower for a fish that moment, as on the day his craft 
first struck the cruising-ground ; and Radney the mate was quite as 
ready to change his berth for a boat, and with his bandaged mouth 
seek to gag in death the vital jaw of the whale. 

“But though the Lakeman had induced the seamen to adopt this 


236 


MOBY DICK; OR 

sort of passiveness in their conduct, he kept his own counsel (at least 
till all was over) concerning his own proper and private revenge upon 
the man who had stung him in the ventricles of his heart. He was 
in Radney the chief mate’s watch ; and as if the infatuated man sought 
to run more than half-way to meet his doom, after the scene at the 
rigging, he insisted, against the express counsel of the Captain, upon 
resuming the head of his watch at night. Upon this, and one or two 
other circumstances, Steelkilt systematically built the plan of his re- 
venge. 

“During the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on 
the bulwarks of the quarter-deck, and leaning his arm upon the gun- 
wale of the boat which was hoisted up there, a little above the ship’s 
side. In this attitude, it was well known he sometimes dozed. There 
was a considerable vacancy between the boat and the ship, and down 
between this was the sea. Steelkilt calculated his time, and found 
that his next trick at the helm would come round at two o’clock, in 
the morning of the third day from that in which he had been betrayed. 
At his leisure, he employed the interval in braiding something very 
carefully in his watches below. 

“ ‘What are you making there ?” said a shipmate. 

“ ‘What do you think ? what does it look like V 

“ ‘Like a lanyard for your hag ; but it’s an odd one, seems to me.’ 

“ ‘Yes, rather oddish,’ said the Lakeman, holding it at arm’s 
length before him; ‘but I think it will answer. Shipmate, I haven’t 
enough twine, — have you any V 

“But there was none in the forecastle. 

“ ‘Then I must get some from old Rad’ ; and he rose to go aft. 

“ ‘You don’t mean to go a begging to him!’ said a sailor. 

“ ‘Why not ? Do you think he won’t do me a turn, when it’s to 
help himself in the end, shipmate V and going to the mate, he looked 
at him quietly, and asked him for some twine to mend his hammock. 
It was given him — neither twine nor lanyard were seen again; but 
the next night an iron ball, closely netted, partly rolled from the 
pocket of the Lakeman’s monkey jacket, as he was tucking the coat 
into his hammock for a pillow. Twenty-four hours after, his trick 
at the silent helm — nigh to the man who was apt to doze over the grave 


THE WHITE WHALE 237 

always ready dug to the seaman’s hand — that fatal hour was then to 
come ; and in the fore-ordaining soul of Steelkilt, the mate was already 
stark and stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in. 

“But, gentlemen, a fool saved the would-be murderer from the 
bloody deed ha had planned. Yet complete revenge he had, and with- 
out being the avenger. For by a mysterious fatality, Heaven itself 
seemed to step in to take put of his hands into its own the damning 
thing he would have done. 

“It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the 
second day, when they were washing down the decks, that a stupid 
Teneriffe man, drawing water in the main-chains, all at once shouted 
out, ‘There she rolls! there she rolls!’ Jesu, what a whale! It was 
Moby Dick. 

“ ‘Moby Dick !’ cried Don Sebastian ; ‘St. Dominic ! Sir sailor, but 
do whales have christenings ? Whom call you Moby Dick V 

“A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, 
Don ; — but that would be too long a story. 

“ ‘How ? how V cried all the young Spaniards, crowding. 

“Hay, Dons, Dons — nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let 
me get more into the air, sirs. 

“ ‘The chicha! the chicha!’ cried Don Pedro; ‘our vigorous friend 
looks faint ; — fill up his empty glass !’ 

“Ho need, gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed. — How, gentle- 
men, so suddenly perceiving the snowy whale within fifty yards of the 
ship — forgetful of the compact among the crew — in the excitement 
of the moment, the Teneriffe man had instinctively and involuntarily 
lifted his voice for the monster, though for some little time past 
it had been plainly beheld from the three sullen mastheads. All 
was now a frenzy. ‘The White Whale — the White Whale!’ was the 
cry from captain, mates, and harpooneers, who, undeterred by fearful 
rumours, were all anxious to capture so famous and precious a fish; 
while the dogged crew eyed askance, and with curses, the appalling 
beauty of the vast milky mass, that lit up by a horizontal spangling 
sun shifted and glistened like a living opal in the blue morning sea. 
Gentlemen, a strange fatality pervades the whole career of these 
events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted. 


238 


MOBY DICK; OR 

The mutineer was the bowsman of the mate, and when fast to a fish, 
it was his duty to sit next him, while Eadney stood up with his lance 
in the prow, and haul in or slacken the line, at the word of command. 
Moreover, when the four boats were lowered, the mate’s got the start ; 
and none howled more fiercely with delight than did Steelkilt, as he 
strained at his oar. After a stiff pull, their harpooneer got fast, and, 
spear in hand, Eadney sprang to the bow. He was always a furious 
man, it seems, in a boat. And now his bandaged cry was, to beach 
him on the whale’s topmost back. Nothing loath, his bowsman 
hauled him up and up ; through a blinding foam that blent two white- 
nesses together; till of a sudden the boat struck as against a sunken 
ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the standing mate. That instant, 
as he fell on the whale’s slippery back, the boat righted, and was 
dashed aside by the swell, while Eadney was tossed over into the sea, 
on the other flank of the whale. He struck out through the spray, and, 
for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil wildly seeking to 
remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale rushed 
round in a sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer between the jaws; 
and rearing high up with him, plunged headlong again, and went 
down. 

“Meantime, at the first tap of the boat’s bottom, the Lakeman had 
slackened the line, so as to drop astern from the whirlpool; calmly 
looking on, he thought his own thoughts. But a sudden, terrific, 
downward jerking of the boat, quickly brought his knife to the line. 
He cut it; and the whale was free. But, at some distance, Moby 
Dick rose again, with some tatters of Eadney’s red woollen shirt, 
caught in the teeth that had destroyed him. All four boats gave 
chase again; but the whale eluded them, and finally wholly disap- 
peared. 

“In good time, the Town-Ho reached her port — a savage, solitary 
place — where no civilised creature resided. There, headed by the 
Lakeman, all but five or six of the foremastmen deliberately deserted 
among the palms; eventually, as it turned out, seizing a large double 
war-canoe of the savages, and setting sail for some other harbour. 

“The ship’s company being reduced to but a handful, the Captain 
called upon the islanders to assist him in the laborious business of 


239 


THE WHITE WHALE 

heaving down the ship to stop the leak. But to such unresting vigi- 
lance over their dangerous allies was this small hand of whites necessi- 
tated, both by night and by day, and so extreme was the hard work 
they underwent, that upon the vessel being ready again for sea, they 
were in such a weakened condition that the Captain durst not put off 
with them in so heavy a vessel. After taking council with his officers, 
he anchored the ship as far off shore as possible; loaded and ran out 
his two cannons from the hows ; stacked his muskets on the poop ; and 
warning the islanders not to approach the ship at their peril, took 
one man with him, and setting the sail of his best whale boat, steered 
straight before the wind for Tahiti, five hundred miles distant, to 
procure a reinforcement to his crew. 

“On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which 
seemed to have touched at a low isle of corals. He steered away 
from it; but the savage craft bore down on him; and soon the voice 
of Steelkilt hailed him to heave-to, or he would run him under water. 
The Captain presented a pistol. With one foot on each prow of 
the yoked war-canoes, the Lakeman laughed him to scorn; assuring 
him that if the pistol so much as clicked in the lock, he would bury 
him in bubbles and foam. 

“ ‘What do you want of me V cried the Captain. 

“ ‘Where are you bound ? and for what are you bound V demanded 
Steelkilt; ‘no lies.” 

“ ‘I am bound to Tahiti for more men.’ 

“ ‘Very good. Let me board you a moment — I come in peace.’ 
With that he leaped from the canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing 
the gunwale, stood face to face with the Captain. 

“ ‘Cross your arms, sir throw back your head. How, repeat after 
me. As soon as Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on 
yonder island, and remain there six days. If I do not, may light- 
nings strike me !’ 

“ ‘A pretty scholar,’ laughed the Lakeman. ‘Adios, Senor !’ and 
leaping into the sea, he swam back to his comrades. 

“Watching the boat until it was fairly beached, and drawn up to 
the roots of the cocoanut trees, Steelkilt made sail again, and in due 
time arrived at Tahiti, his own place of destination. There, luck 


240 


MOBY DICK; OR 

befriended him; two ships were about to sail for France, and were 
providentially in want of precisely that number of men which the sailor 
headed. They embarked ; and so for ever got the start of their former 
captain, had he been at all minded to work them legal retribution. 

“Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale boat arrived, 
and the Captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized Tahi- 
tians, who had been somewhat used to the sea. Chartering a small na- 
tive schooner, he returned with them to his vessel; and finding all 
right there, again resumed his cruisings. 

“Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know ; but upon the island 
of Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which re- 
fuses to give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale 
that destroyed him. . . . 

“ ‘Are you through ?’ said Don Sebastian quietly. 

“I am, Don. 

“ ‘Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions, 
this your story is in substance really true ? It is so passing wonderful ! 
Did you get it from an unquestionable source? Bear with me if I 
seem to press.’ 

“ ‘Also bear with all of us, sir sailor; for we all join in Don Sebas- 
tian’s suit,’ cried the company, with exceeding interest. 

“Is there a copy of the Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn, gentle- 
men ? 

“ ‘Nay,’ said Don Sebastian; ‘but I know a worthy priest near by, 
who will quickly procure one for me. I go for it; but are you well 
advised ? this may grow too serious.’ 

“Will you be so good as to bring the priest also, Don ? 

“ ‘Though there are no Auto-da-Fes in Lima now,’ said one of the 
company to another; ‘I fear our sailor friend runs risk of the arch- 
iepiscopacy. Let us withdraw more out of the moonlight. I see no 
need of this.’ 


“ ‘This is the priest, he brings you the Evangelists,’ said Don Sebas- 
tian gravely, returning with a tall and solemn figure. 

“Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into 


241 


THE WHITE WHALE 

the light, and hold the Holy Book before me that I may touch it. 

“So help me, HeaVen, and on my honour, the story I have told ye, 
gentlemen, is in substance and its great items, true. I know it to be 
true ; it happened on this ball ; I trod the ship ; I knew the crew ; 
I have seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney.” 


CHAPTER LIV 

OF THE MONSTROUS PICTURES OF WHALES 

I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, some- 
thing like the true form of a whale as he actually appears to the eye 
of the whalemen when in his own absolute body the whale is moored 
alongside the whale ship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there. 
It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those cu- 
rious imaginary portraits of him. which even down to the present day 
confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the 
world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all 
wrong. 

It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will 
be found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. 
Eor ever since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the 
marble panellings of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields, 
medallions, cups, and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of chain- 
armour like Saladin’s, and a helmeted head like St. George’s; ever 
since then has something of the same sort of licence prevailed, not 
only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific 
presentations of him. 

How, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways pur- 
porting to be the whale’s, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of 
Elephanta, in India. The Brahmins maintain that in the almost end- 
less sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, 
every conceivable avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any 
of them actually came into being. Ho wonder then, that in some sort 
our noble profession of whaling should have been there shadowed forth. 
The Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of the 


242 


MOBY DICK; OR 

wall, depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, 
learnedly known as the Matse Avatar. But though this sculpture is 
half man and half whale, so as only to give the tail of the latter, yet 
that small section of him is all wrong. It looks more like the tapering 
tail of an anaconda, than the broad palm of the true whale’s majestic 
flukes. 

But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian painter’s 
portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the antediluvian 
• Hindoo. It is Guido’s picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from 
the sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model of such a 
strange creature as that? fSTor does Hogarth, in painting that same 
scene in his own “Perseus Descending,” make out one whit better. 
The huge corpulence of that Hogarthian monster uiidulatefe on the 
surface, scarcely drawing one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah 
on its back, and its distended tusked mouth into which the billows 
are rolling, might be taken for the Traitors’ Gate leading from the 
Thames by water into the Tower. Then, there are the Prodromus 
whales of old Scotch Sibbald, and Jonah’s whale, as depicted in the 
prints of old Bibles and the cuts of old primers. What shall be said 
of these? As for the bookbinder’s whale winding like a vinestalk 
round the stalk of a descending anchor — as stamped and gilded on the 
backs and title-pages of many books both old and new — that is a very 
picturesque but purely fabulous creature, imitated, I take it, from the 
like figures on antique vases. Though universally denominated a 
dolphin, I nevertheless call this bookbinder’s fish an attempt at a whale ; 
because it was so intended when the device was first introduced. It was 
introduced by an old Italian publisher somewhere about the 15th cen- 
tury, during the Kevival of Learning ; and in those days, and even down 
to a comparatively late period, dolphins were popularly supposed to 
be a species of the Leviathan. 

In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books 
you will at times meet with very curious touches at the whale, where 
all manner of spouts, jete d’eau, hot springs and cold, Saratoga and 
Baden-Baden, come bubbling up from his. unexhausted brain. In 
the title-page of the original edition of the Advancement of Learning 
you will find some curious whales. 


243 


THE WHITE WHALE 

But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at 
those pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delinea- 
tions, by those who know. In old Harris’s collection of voyages there 
are some plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, 
a.d. 1671, entitled A Whaling Voyage to Spitzhergen in the ship Jonas 
in the Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland , master. In one of those 
plates the whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among 
ice-isles, with white bears running over their living hacks. In 
another plate, the prodigious blunder is made of representing the whale 
with perpendicular flukes. 

Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Col- 
nett, a Post Captain in the English Navy, entitled A Voyage round 
Cape Horn into the South Seas , for the purpose of extending the i 
Spermaceti Whale Fisheries. In this book is an outline purporting 
to be a “Picture of a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale 
from one killed on the coast of Mexico, August,- 1793, and hoisted 
on deck.” I doubt not the captain had this veracious picture taken 
for the benefit of his mariners. To mention hut one thing about it, 
let me say that it has an eye which applied, according to the accompany- 
ing scale, to a full-grown sperm whale, would make the eye of that whale 
a bow-window some five feet long. Ah, my gallant captain, why did 
ye not give us Jonah looking out of that eye ! 

Nor are the most conscientious compilations of natural history for 
the benefit of the young and tender, free from the same heinousness of 
mistake. Look at that popular work Goldsmith’s Animated Nature. 
In the abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged 
“whale” and a “narwhal.” I do not wish to seem inelegant, hut this 
unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the 
narwhal, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nine- 
teenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon 
any intelligent public of schoolboys. 

Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacepede, a 
great naturalist, published a scientific systemised whale hook, wherein 
are several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan. All 
these are not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus, or 
Greenland whale (that is to say, the Right whale), even Scoresby, a 


244 


MOBY DICK; OR 

long experienced man as touching that species, declares not to have 
its counterpart in nature. 

But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was 
reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous 
Baron. In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which 
he gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing 
that picture to any Nantucketer, you had best provide for your 
summary retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier’s 
Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, hut a squash. Of course, he 
never had the benefit of a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), 
hut whence he derived that picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got 
it as his scientific predecessor in the same field, Desmarest, got one of 
his authentic abortions; that is, from a Chinese drawing. And what 
sort of lively lads with the pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups 
and saucers inform us. 

As for the sign-painters’ whales seen in the streets hanging over the 
shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them? They are generally 
Richard III whales, with dromedary humps, and very savage; break- 
fasting on three or four sailor tarts, that is whale boats full of mari- 
ners : their deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue paint. 

But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very 
surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have 
been taken from the stranded fish ; and these are about as correct as a 
drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly repre- 
sent the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars. 

Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living levia- 
than has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living 
whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in 
unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, 
like ^ launched line-of-battle ship ; and out of that element it is a thing 
eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, 
so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. And, not to 
speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young 
sucking whale and a full-ground Platonian Leviathan ; yet even in the 
case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship’s deck, such 


THE WHITE WHALE 245 

is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that 
his precise expression the devil himself could not catch. 

But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded 
whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at 
all. For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that 
his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy 
Bentham’s skeleton, which is preserved in the library of one of his 
executor’s, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian 
old gentleman, with all Jeremy’s other leading personal characteristics; 
yet nothing of this kind could he inferred from any leviathan’s artic- 
ulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton 
of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded 
animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelops 
it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some part 
of this book will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously dis- 
played in the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the 
bones of the human hand, minus only the thumb. This fin has four 
regular hone-fingers, the index, middle, ring, and little finger. But 
all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human 
fingers in an artificial covering. “However recklessly the whale may 
sometimes serve us,” said humorous Stubb one day, “he can never be 
truly said to handle us without mittens.” 

For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must 
needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the 
world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait 
may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with 
any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way 
of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like ; and the only 
mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living con' 
tour, is by going a-whaling yourself ; but by so doing, you run no small 
risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to 
me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this 
Leviathan. 


246 


MOBY DICK; OR 

CHAPTER LV 


OF THE LESS ERRONEOUS PICTURES OF WHALES, AND THE 
TRUE PICTURES OF WHALING SCENES 

In connection with the monstrous pictures of whales,, I am strongly 
tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of them 
which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and modern, espe- 
cially in Pliny, Purchas, Hakluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I pass 
that matter by. 

I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale: 
Colnett’s, Huggins’s, Frederick Cuvier’s, and Beale’s. In the pre- 
vious chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins’s is 
far better than theirs ; but, by great odds, Beale’s is the best. All 
Beale’s drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle figure 
in the picture of three whales in various attitudes, capping his second 
chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no 
doubt calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlour men, 
is admirably correct and lifelike in its general effect. Some of the 
Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in 
contour; but they are wretchedly engraved. That is not his fault 
though. 

Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but 
they are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression. 
He has but one picture of' whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency, 
because it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, that you can 
derive anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen by his 
living hunters. 

But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details 
not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be 
anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed, and 
taken from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they represent 
attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale. In the first engraving a noble 
Sperm Whale is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath 
the boat from the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the 
air upon his back the terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The prow of 
the boat is* partially unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the 


THE WHITE WHALE 247 

monster’s spine ; and standing in that prow*, for that one single incom- 
putable flash of time, you behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the in- 
censed boiling spout of the whale, and in the act of leaping as if from 
a precipice: The action of the whole thing is wonderfully good and 
true. The half emptied line-tub floats on the whitened sea ; the wooden 
poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads of the 
swimming crew are scattered about the whale in. contrasting expressions 
of affright ; while in the black stormy distance the ship is bearing down 
upon the scene. Serious fault might be found with the anatomical 
details of this whale, but let that pass ; since for the life of me, I could 
not draw so good a one. 

In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside 
the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale that rolls his 
black weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rockslide from the Pata- 
gonian cliffs. His jets are erect”, full, and black like soot; so that from 
so abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think there must be 
a brave supper cooking in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are peck- 
ing at. the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and macaroni, 
which the Right Whale sometimes carries on his pestilent back. And 
all the while the thick-lipped leviathan, is* rushing through the deep, 
leaving tons of tumultous white curds in his wake, and causing the 
slight boat to rock in the swells like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels 
of an ocean steamer. Thus, the foreground is all raging commotion; 
but behind, in admirable artistic contrast, is the glassy level of a 1 sea be- 
calmed, the drooping unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the 
inert mass of a dead whale, a conquered fortress, with the flag of 
capture lazily hanging from the whale-pole inserted into his spout- 
hole. 

Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it 
he was either practically conversant with his subject or else marvellously 
tutored by some experienced whaleman. The French are the lads for 
painting action. Go and gaze upon the paintings of Europe, and 
where will you find such a gallery of living and breathing commotion 
on canvas, as in that triumphal hall at Versailles; where the beholder 
fights his way, pell-mell through the consecutive great battles of France; 
where every sWord seems a flash of the Northern Lights, and the sue- 


248 


MOBY DICK; OR 

cessive armed kings and emperors dash by, like a charge of crowded 
centaurs ? INTot wholly unworthy of a place in that gallery, are these 
sea battle-pieces of Garnery. 

The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness 
of things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engrav- 
ings they have of their whaling scenes. With not one-tenth of Eng- 
land’s experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of that of 
the Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the 
only finished sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of the 
whale hunt. For the most part, the English and American whale 
draughtsmen seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical 
outline of things, such as the vacant profile of the whale ; which, so far 
as picturesqueness of effect is concerned, is about tantamount to sketch- 
ing the profile of a pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly renowned 
‘Eight whaleman, after giving us a stiff full-length of the Greenland 
whale, and three or four delicate miniatures of narwhals and porpoises, 
treats us to a series of classical engravings of boat-hooks, chopping 
knives, and grapnels ; and with the microscopic diligence of a Leuwen- 
hoeck submits to the inspection of a shivering world ninety-six facsim- 
iles of magnified Arctic snow crystals. I mean no disparagement to 
the excellent voyager (I honour him for a veteran), but in so important 
a matter it was certainly an oversight not to have procured for every 
crystal a sworn affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice of the Peace. 

In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two 
other French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes 
himself “H. Durand.” One of them, though not precisely adapted to 
our present purpose, nevertheless deserves mention on other accounts. 
It is a quiet noon scene among the isles of the Pacific; a French whaler 
anchored, inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking water on board; the 
loosened sails of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms in the back- 
ground, both drooping together in the breezeless air. The effect is very 
fine, when considered with reference to its presenting the hardy fisher- 
men under one of their few aspects of oriental repose. The other en- 
graving is quite a different affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, 
and in the very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Eight Whale along- 
side; the vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if 


THE WHITE WHALE 249 

to a quay ; and a boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity, 
is about giving chase to whales in the distance. The harpoons and 
lances lie levelled for use; three oarsmen are just setting the mast in 
its hole ; while from the sudden roll of the sea, the little craft stands 
half erect out of the water, like a rearing horse. From the ship, the 
smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is going up like the smoke 
over a village of smithies; and to windward, a black cloud, rising up 
with earnest squalls and rains, seems to quicken the activity of the 
excited seamen. 


CHAPTEE LVI 

OF WHALES IN PAINT; IN TEETH; IN WOOD; IN SHEET-IRON; 

in stone; in mountains; in stars 

On Tower Hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have 
seen a crippled beggar (or hedger , as the sailors say) holding a painted 
board before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg. 
There are three whales and three boats ; and one of the boats (presumed 
to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being crunched 
by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten years, they tell 
me, has that man held up that picture, and exhibited that stump to an 
incredulous world. But the time of his justification has now come. 
His three whales are as good whales as- were ever published in Wapping, 
at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will 
find in the western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on that 
stump, never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman make ; but, with 
downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own amputation. 

Throughout the Pacific, and also in Hantucket, and Hew Bedford, 
and Sag Harbour, you will come across lively sketches of whales and 
whaling scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale 
teeth, or ladies 7 busks wrought out of the Eight Whale bone, and other 
like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little 
ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material, 
in their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little boxes of den- 
tistical-looking implements, specially intended for the skrimshandering 


Sso MOBY DICK; OR 

business. But, in general, they toil with their jack-knives alone; and, 
with that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor, they will turn you out 
anything you please, in the way of a mariner’s fancy. 

Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a 
man to that condition in which God placed him, i. e., what is called 
savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. 
I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the 
Cannibals ; and ready at any moment to rebel against him. 

How, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic 
hours, is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian 
war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carv- 
ing, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. 
Lor, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark’s tooth, that miracu- 
lous intricacy of wooden network has been achieved; and it has cost 
steady years of steady application. 

As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With 
the same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark’s tooth, 
of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, 
not quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design, 
as the Greek savage, Achilles’s shield; and full of barbaric spirit and 
suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Hutch savage, Albert Hiirer. 

Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs 
of the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the fore- 
castles of American whalers. Some of them are done with much ac- 
curacy. 

At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales 
hung by the tail for knockers to the roadside door. When the porter is 
sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best. But these knocking 
whales are seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some 
old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for 
weather-cocks ; but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all in- 
tents and purposes so labelled with “Hands off!” you cannot examine 
them closely enough to decide upon their merit. 

In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken 
cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain, 
you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the Levia- 


THE WHITE WHALE 251 

than partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them 
in a surf of green surges. 

Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is con- 
tinually girdled by amphitheatrical heights ; here and there from some 
lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of 
whales defined along the undulating ridges. But you must he a 
thorough whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you 
wish to return to such a sight again, you must he sure and take the 
exact intersecting latitude and longitude of your first standpoint, else 
so chancelike are such observations of the hills, that your precise, pre- 
vious standpoint would require a laborious re-discovery ; like the Soloma 
Islands, which still remain incognita, though once high-ruffed Men- 
danna trod them and old Figuera chronicled them. 

Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace 
out great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; 
as when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations, saw armies 
locked in battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased 
Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright 
points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Ant- 
arctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against 
the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Fly- 
ing Fish. 

With a frigate’s anchors for my bridle-bitts, and fasces of harpoons 
for spurs, would I could mount that whale and lead the topmost skies, 
to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really 
lie encamped beyond my mortal sight ! 

CHAPTEE LYII 

BRIT 

Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast 
meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the -Eight 
Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, 
so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and 
golden wheat. 


252 


MOBY DICK; OR 

On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure 
from the attack of a Sperm Whale like the Pequod, with open jaws 
sluggishly swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres 
of that wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner 
separated from the water that escaped at the lip. 

As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance 
their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads ; even so these 
monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving 
behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea . 1 

But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which 
at all reminded one of mowers. Seen from the mastheads especially 
when they paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black 
forms looked more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else. And 
as in the great hunting countries of India, the stranger at a distance 
will sometimes pass on the plains recumbent elephants without knowing 
them to be such, taking them for bare, blackened elevations of the soil ; 
even so, often, with him, who for the first time beholds this species 
of the leviathans of the sea. And even when recognised at last, their 
immense magnitude renders it very hard really to believe that such 
bulky masses of overgrowth can possibly be instinct, in all parts, with 
the same sort of life that lives in a dog or a horse. 

Indeed, in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of 
the deep with the same feelings that you do those of the shore. For 
though some old naturalists have maintained that all creatures of the 
land are of their kind in the sea; and though taking a broad general 
view of the thing, this may very well be; yet coming to specialties, 
where, for example, does the ocean furnish any fish that in disposition 
answers to the sagacious kindness of the dog? The accursed shark 
alone can in any generic respect be said to bear comparative analogy 
to him. 

But though to landsmen in general the native inhabitants of the seas 
have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repel- 

1 That part of the sea known among whalemen as the “Brazil Banks” 
does not bear that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of there 
being shallows and soundings there, but because of this remarkable meadow- 
like appearance, caused by the vast drifts of brit continually floating in those 
latitudes, where the Right Whale is often chased. 


9 53 


THE WHITE WHALE 

ling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita > so 
that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his 
one superficial western one ; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all 
mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens 
and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; 
though hut a moment’s consideration will teach, that however baby-man 
may brag of his science and skill and however much, in a flattering 
future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for 
ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and 
pulverise the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make ; nevertheless, by the 
continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense 
of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it. 

The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese 
vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a 
widow. That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the 
wrecked ships of last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not 
yet subsided ; two-thirds of the fair world it yet covers. 

Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not 
a miracle upon the other ? Preternatural terrors rested upon the He- 
brews, when under the feet of Korah and his company the live ground 
opened and swallowed them up for ever; yet not a modern sun ever 
sets, but in precisely the same manner the live sea swallows up ships 
and crews. 

But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, hut it is 
also a fiend to its own offspring ; worse than the Persian host who mur- 
dered his own guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath 
spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her 
own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, 
and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No 
mercy, no power hut its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a 
mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns 
the globe. 

Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures 
glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously 
hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish 
brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the 
dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once 


254 : 


MOBY DICK; OR 

more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey 
upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began. 

Consider all this ; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile 
earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find 
a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling 
ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one 
insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, hut encompassed by all the 
horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from 
that isle, thou canst never return ! 


CHAPTER LVIII 

SQUID 

Slowly wading through the meadows of hrit, the Pequod still held on 
her way north-eastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air im- 
pelling her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her three tall, 
tapering masts mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild 
palms on a plain. And still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, 
the lonely, alluring jet would be seen. 

But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preter- 
natural spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant 
calm; when the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a 
golden finger laid across them, enjoining some secrecy; when the 
slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on ; in this pro- 
found hush of the visible sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo 
from the mainmast head. 

In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher 
and higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed 
before our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glist- 
ening for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more 
arose, and silently gleamed. It seemed not a whale; and yet is this 
Moby Dick ? thought Daggoo. Again the phantom went down, but on 
reappearing once more, with a stiletto-like cry that startled every man 
from his nod, the negro yelled out — “There! there again! there she 
breaches! right ahead! The White Whale, the White Whale !” 


THE WHITE WHALE 255 

Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yardarms, as in swarming-time 
the bees rush to the boughs. Bareheaded in the sultry sun, Ahab stood 
on the bowsprit, and with one hand pushed far behind in readiness to 
wave his orders to the helmsman, cast his eager glance in the direction 
indicated aloft by the outstretched motionless arm of Daggoo. 

Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and solitary jet had 
gradually, worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to connect 
the ideas of mildness and repose with the first sight of the particular 
whale he pursued ; however this was, or whether his eagerness betrayed 
him — whichever way it might have been — no sooner did he distinctly 
perceive the white mass, than with a quick intensity he instantly gave 
orders for lowering. 

The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab’s in advance, and all 
swiftly pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, 
with oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo ! in the 
same spot where it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting 
for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most 
wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to 
mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a 
glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long 
arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest 
of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. 
No perceptible face or front did it have ; no conceivable token of either 
sensation or instinct ; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, 
formless, chance-like apparition of life. 

As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck, 
still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice 
exclaimed — “ Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, 
than to have seen thee, thou white ghost !” 

“What was it, sir ?” said Flask. 

“The great live squid, which, they say, few whale ships ever beheld, 
and returned to their ports to tell of it.” 

But Ahab said nothing; turning, his boat, he sailed back to the 
vessel ; the rest as silently following. 

Whatever superstitions the Sperm whalemen in general have con- 
nected with the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it 


£56 


MOBY DICK; OR 

being so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it 
with portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of 
them declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very 
few of them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true 
nature and form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the 
Sperm Whale his only food. For though other species of whales find 
their food, above water, and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, 
the Spermaceti Whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones below 
the surface; and only by interference is it that any one can tell of 
what, precisely, that food consists. At times, when closely pursued, 
he will disgorge what are supposed to be the detached arms of the 
squid; some of them thus exhibited exceeding twenty and thirty 
feet in length. They fancy that the monster to which these arms 
belonged ordinarily clings by them to the bed of the ocean; and that 
the Sperm whale, unlike other species, is supplied with teeth in 
order to attack and tear it. 

There seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of 
Bishop Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into squid. The 
manner in which the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising and 
sinking, with some other particulars he narrates, in all this the two 
correspond. But much abatement is necessary with respect to the 
incredible bulk he assigns it. 

By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumours of the mys- 
terious creature here spoken of, it is included among the class of 
cuttle-fish, to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would 
seem to belong, but only as the Anak of the tribe. 

CHAPTER LIX 

THE LINE 

With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well 
as for the better understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere pre- 
sented, I have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible whale- 
line. 

The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, slightly 


THE WHITE WHALE 


257 


vapoured with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the case of ordinary 
ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp more pliable 
to the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more convenient to 
the sailor for common ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary 
quantity too much stiffen the whale-line for the close coiling to which 
it must he subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar 
in general by no means adds to the rope’s durability or strength, 
however much it may give it compactness and gloss. 

Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost 
entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-line; for, though 
not so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; 
and I will add (since there is an aesthetic in all things), is much more 
handsome and becoming to the boat than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, 
dark fellow, a sort of Indian ; but Manilla is a golden-haired Circassian 
to behold. 

The whale-line is only two-thirds of an inch in thickness. At first 
sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is. By experi- 
ment its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one hundred 
and twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly 
equal to three tons. In length, the common sperm whale-line measures 
something over two hundred fathoms. Toward the stern of the boat it is 
spirally coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still, though, 
but so as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded 
“sheaves,” or layers of concentric spiralisations, without any hollow 
but the “heart,” or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the 
cheese. As the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running 
out, infallibly take somebody’s arm, leg, or entire body off, the ut- 
most precaution is used in stowing the line in its tub. Some har- 
pooneers will consume almost an entire morning in this business, 
carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards through a 
block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it from all 
possible wrinkles and twists. 

In the English boats two tubs are used instead of one; the same 
line being continuously coiled in both tubs. There is some advantage 
in this: because these twin-tubs being so small they fit more readily 
into the boat, and do not strain it so much; whereas, the American 


258 


MOBY DICK; OR 

tub, nearly three feet in diameter and of proportionate depth, makes 
a rather bulky freight for a craft whose planks are but one half-inch 
in thickness; for the bottom of the whale boat is like critical ice, 
which will bear up a considerable distributed weight, but not very 
much of a concentrated one. When the painted canvas cover is 
clapped on the American line-tub, the boat looks as if it were pulling 
off with a prodigious great wedding-cake to present to the whales. 

Both ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an 
eye-splice or loop coming up from the bottom against the side oi the 
tub, and hanging over its edge completely disengaged from everything. 
This arrangement of the lower end is necessary on two accounts. 
First: 'in order to facilitate the fastening to it of an additional line 
from a neighbouring boat, in case the stricken whale should sound so 
deep as to threaten to carry off the entire line originally attached 
to the harpoon. In these instances, the whale of course is shifted 
like a mug of ale, as it were, from the one boat to the other; though 
the first boat always hovers at hand to assist its consort. Second: 
This arrangement is indispensable for common safety’s sake; for 
were the lower end of the line in any way attached to the boat, 
and were the whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a 
single, smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop 
there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him 
into the profundity of the sea; and in that case no town-crier would 
ever find her again. 

Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the 
line is taken aft from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead 
there, is again carried forward the entire length of the boat, resting 
crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man’s oar, so that it jogs 
against his wrist in rowing; and also passing between the men, as 
they alternately sit at the opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks 
or grooves in the extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden 
pin or skewer the siz& of a common quill, prevents it from slipping out. 
From the chocks it hangs in a slight festoon over the bows, and 
is then passed inside the boat again ; and some ten or twenty fathoms 
(called box-line) being coiled upon the box, in the bows, it con- 
tinues its way to the gunwale still a little farther aft, and is then 


THE WHITE WHALE 259 

attached to the short-warp — the rope which is immediately connected 
with the harpoon ; hut previous to that connection, the short-warp 
goes through sundry mystifications too tedious to detail. 

Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, 
twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the 
oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid 
eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with the deadliest 
snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Kor can any son of mortal 
woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen intricacies, 
and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any 
unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible 
contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus 
circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in 
his hones to quiver in him like a shaken jelly. Yet habit — strange 
thing ! what cannot habit accomplish ? — Gayer sallies, more merry 
mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never heard over your 
mahogany, than you will hear over the half-inch white cedar of 
the whale boat, when thus hung in hangman’s nooses ; and, like 
the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men com- 
posing the crew pull into jaws of death, with a halter around every 
neck, as you may say. 

Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account for 
those repeated whaling disasters — some few of which are casually 
chronicled — of this man or that man being taken out of the boat by 
the line, and lost. Eor, when the line is darting out, to be seated 
then in the boat, is like being seated in the midst of the manifold 
whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, 
and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you. It is worse ; for you cannot sit 
motionless in the heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking 
like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and the other, without 
the slightest warning, and only by certain self-adjusting buoyancy 
and simultaneousness of volition and action, can you escape being made 
a Mazeppa of, and run away with where the all-seeing sun himself 
could never pierce you out. 

Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and 
prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; 


260 


MOBY DICK; OR 

for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; 
and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the 
fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose 
of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being 
brought into actual play — this is a thing which carries more of true 
terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say 
more? All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with 
halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, 
sudden turn of death, that mortals realise the silent, subtle, ever- 
present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated 
in the whale boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of 
terror than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, 
and not a harpoon, by your side. 


CHAPTER LX 

STUBB KILLS A WHALE 

If to Starbuck the apparition of the squid was a thing of portents, 
to Queequeg it was quite a different object. 

“When you see him ’quid,” said the savage, honing his harpoon in 
the bow of his hoisted boat, “then you quick see him ’parm whale.” 

The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing 
special to engage them, the Pequod’s crew could hardly resist the spell 
of sleep induced by such a vacant sea. For this part of the Indian 
Ocean through which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen 
call a lively ground; that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, 
dolphins, flying-fish, and other vivacious denizens of more stirring 
waters, than those off the Rio de la Plata, or the inshore ground off 
Peru. 

It was my turn to stand at the foremast head ; and with my shoulders 
leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed 
in what seemed an enchanted air. Ho resolution could withstand it; 
in that dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went 
out of my body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendu- 
lum will, long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn. 


261 


THE WHITE WHALE 

Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that 
the seamen at the main and mizzen-mastheads were already drowsy. 
So that at last all three of us lifelessly swung from the spars, and 
for every swing that we made there was a nod from below from 
the slumbering helmsman. The waves, too, nodded their indolent 
crests; and across the wide trance of the sea, east nodded to west, 
and the sun over all. 

Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like 
vices my hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency 
preserved me ; with a shock I came back to life. And lo ! close under 
our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling 
in the water like the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy 
back of an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun’s rays like a mirror. 
But lazily undulating in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon 
tranquilly spouting his vapoury jet, the wdiale looked like a portly 
burgher smoking his pipe of a warm afternoon. But that pipe, poor 
whale, was thy last. As if struck by some enchanter’s wand, the 
sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once started into wakeful- 
ness; and more than a score of voices from all parts of the vessel, 
simultaneously with the three notes from aloft, shouted forth the 
accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly spouted the 
sparkling brine into the air. 

“Clear away the boats! Luff!” cried Ahab. And obeying his 
own order, he dashed the helm down before the helmsman could 
handle the spokes. 

The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale ; 
and ere the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to 
the leeward, but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few 
ripples as he swam, that thinking after all he might not as yet be 
alarmed, Ahab gave orders that not an oar should be used, and no man 
must speak but in whispers. So seated like Ontario Indians on the 
gunwales of the boats, we swiftly but silently paddled along; the 
calm not admitting of the noiseless sails being set. Presently, as we 
thus glided in chase, the monster perpendicularly flitted his tail 
forty feet into the air, and then sank out of sight like a tower swal- 
lowed up. 


262 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“There go flukes !” was the cry, an announcement immediately 
followed by Stubb’ s producing his match and igniting his pipe, for 
now a respite was granted. After the full interval of his sounding 
had elapsed, the whale rose again, and being now in advance of the 
smoker’s boat, and much nearer to it than to any of the others, Stubb 
counted upon the honour of the capture. It was obvious now, that the 
whale had at length become aware* of his pursuers. All silence 
or cautiousness was therefore no longer of use. Paddles were dropped, 
and oars came loudly into play. And still puffing at his pipe, Stubb 
cheered on his crew to the assault. ' 

Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his 
jeopardy, he was going “head out”; that part obliquely projecting 
from the mad yeast which he brewed . 1 

“Start her, start her, my men! Don’t hurry yourselves; take 
plenty of time — but start her; start her like thunderclaps, that’s all,” 
cried Stubb, spluttering out the smoke as he spoke. “Start her, now; 
give ’em the long and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash, my 
boy — start her, all ; but keep cool, keep cool — cucumbers is the 
word — easy, easy — only start her like grim death and grinning 
devils, and raise the buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, 
boys — that’s all. Start her!” 

“Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!” screamed the Gay-Header in reply, raising 
some old war-whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the strained 
boat involuntarily bounced forward with the one tremendous leading 
stroke which the eager Indian gave. 

But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild. “Kee- 
hee ! Kee-hee!” yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on his 
seat, like a pacing tiger in his cage. 

“Ka-la Koo-loo!” howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over 

1 It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance the 
entire interior of the sperm whale’s enormous head consists. Though appar- 
ently the most massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about him. So 
that with ease he elevates it in the air, and invariably does so when going at 
his utmost speed. Besides, such is the breadth of the upper part of the front 
of his head, and such the tapering cut-water formation of the lower part, that 
by obliquely elevating his head, he thereby may be said to transform him- 
self from a bluff-bowed, sluggish galliot into a sharp-pointed New York pilot 
boat. 


THE WHITE WHALE 


263 


a mouthful of Grenadier’s steak. And thus with oars and yells the 
keels cut the sea. Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his place in the van, still 
encouraged his men to the onset, all the while puffing the smoke 
from his mouth. Like desperadoes they tugged and they strained, till 
the welcome cry was heard — “Stand up, Tashtego ! — give it to him !” 
The harpoon was hurled. “Stem all!” The oarsmen backed water; 
the same moment something went hot and hissing along every one 
of their wrists. It was the magical line. An instant before, Stubb 
had swiftly caught two additional turns with it round the loggerhead, 
whence, by reason of its increased rapid circlings, a hempen blue 
smoke now jetted up and mingled with the steady fumes from his 
pipe. As the line passed round and round the loggerhead; so also, 
just before reaching that point, it blisteringly passed through and 
through both of Stubb’s hands, from which the hand-cloths, or squares 
of quilted canvas sometimes worn at these times, had accidentally 
dropped. It was like holding an enemy’s sharp two-edged sword by 
the blade, and that enemy all the time striving to wrest it out of your 
clutch. 

“Wet the line! wet the line!” cried Stuhb to the tub oarsmen 
(him seated by the tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed the sea- 
water into it . 1 More turns were taken, so that the line began holding 
its place. The boat now flew through the boiling water like a shark 
all fins. Stubb and Tashtego here changed places — stem for stern — • 
a staggering business truly in that rocking commotion. 

From the vibrating line extending the entire length of the upper 
part of the boat, and from its now being more tight than a harpstring, 
you would have thought the craft had two keels — one cleaving the 
water, the other the air — as the boat churned on through both opposing 
elements at once. A continual cascade played at the bows ; a ceaseless 
whirling eddy in her wake; and, at the slightest motion from within, 
even but of a little finger, the vibratiUg, cracking craft canted over 
her spasmodic gunwale into the sea. Thus they rushed: each man 
with might and main clinging to his seat, to prevent being tossed 

1 Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be stated, that, 
in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the running-line with wate^ 
in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or bailer, is set apart for that purpose. 
Your hat, however, is the most convenient. 


264 


MOBY DICK; OR 

to the foam; and the tall form of Tashtego at the steering-oar crouching 
almost double, in order to bring down his centre of gravity. Whole 
Atlantics and Pacifies seemed passed as they shot on their way, till 
at length the whale somewhat slackened his flight. 

“Haul in — haul in!” cried Stubb to the bowsman! and, facing 
round towards the whale, all hands began pulling the boat up to 
him, while yet the boat was. being towed on. Soon ranging up by 
his flank, Stubb, firmly planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted 
dart after dart into the flying fish; at the word of command, the boat 
alternately sterning out of the way of the whale’s horrible wallow, 
and then ranging up for another fling. 

The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks 
down a hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, 
which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The 
slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its 
reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red 
men. And all the while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonisingly 
shot from the spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff 
from the mouth of the excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling 
in upon his crooked lance (by the line attached to it), Stubb straight- 
ened it again and again by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, 
then again and again sent it into the whale. 

“Pull up — pull up!” he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning 
whale relaxed in his wrath. “Pull up ! — close to !” and the boat ranged 
along the fish’s flank. When reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly 
churned his long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully 
churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some 
gold watch that the whale might have swallowed, and which he was 
fearful of breaking ere he could hook it out. But that gold watch he 
sought was the innermost life of the fish. And now it is struck; for, 
starting from this trance into that unspeakable thing called his “flurry,” 
the monster horribly wallowed in his blood, overwrapped himself 
in impenetrable, mad, boiling spray, so that the imperilled craft in- 
stantly dropping astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from 
that frenzied twilight into the clear air of the day. 

Ancj. now abating in his flurry, the whale once mofe rolled opt 


265 


THE WHITE WHALE 

into view; surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and con- 
tracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonised respirations. 
At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the 
purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back 
again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea. His 
heart had burst! 

“He’s dead, Mr. Stubb,” said Daggoo. 

“Yes; both pipes smoked out!” and withdrawing his own from 
his mouth, Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, 
for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made. 


CHAPTER LXI 

THE DART 

A word concerning an incident in the last chapter. 

According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale boat 
pushes off from the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as tem- 
porary steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling the 
foremost oar, the one known as the harpooneer-oar. How it needs a 
strong, nervous arm to strike the first iron into the fish; for often, in 
what is called a long dart, the heavy implement has to be flung to the 
distance of twenty or thirty feet. But however prolonged and ex- 
hausted the chase, the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar mean- 
while to the uttermost; indeed, he is expected to set an example of 
superhuman activity to the rest, not only by incredible rowing, but 
by repeated loud and intrepid exclamations; and what it is to -keep 
shouting at the top of one’s compass, while all the other muscles are 
strained and hall started — what that is none know but those who have 
tried it. For one, I cannot bawl very heartily and work very recklessly 
at one and the same time. In this straining, bawling state, then, with 
his back to the fish, all at once the exhausted harpooneer hears the ex- 
cited cry — “Stand up, and give it to him !” He now has to drop and 
secure his oar, turn round on his centre half-way, seize his harpoon 
from the crotch, and with what little strength may remain, he essays 
to pitch it somehow into the whale. Ho wonder, taking the whole fleet 


266 


MOBY DICK; OR 

of whalemen in a body, that out of fifty fair chances for a dart, not five 
are successful : no wonder that so many hapless harpooneers are madly 
cursed and disrated ; no wonder that some of them actually burst their 
blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some Sperm whalemen are 
absent four years with four barrels ; no wonder that to many ship 
owners, whaling is but a losing concern ; for it is the harpooneer that 
makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out of his body how 
can you expect to find it there when most wanted! 

Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant, 
that is, when the whale starts to run, the boatheader and harpooneer 
likewise start to running fore and aft to the imminent jeopardy of 
themselves and every one else. It is then they change places ; and the 
headsman, the chief officer of the little craft, takes his proper station 
in the bows of the boat. 

Now, I care not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both 
foolish and unnecessary. The headsman should stay in the bows 
from first to last ; he should both dart the harpoon and the lance, and no 
rowing whatever should be expected of him except under circumstances 
obvious to any fisherman. I know that this would sometimes involve 
a slight loss of speed in the chase; but long experience in various 
whalemen of more than one nation has convinced me that in the vast 
majority of failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so 
much the speed of the whale as the before described exhaustion of the 
harpooneer that has caused them. 

To ensure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of 
this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from 
out of toil. 


CHAPTER LXII 

THE CROTCH 

Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, 
in productive subjects, grow the chapters. 

The crotch alluded to on a previous page deserves independent men- 
tion. It is a notched stick of a peculiar form, some two feet in 


THE WHITE WHALE 267 

length, which is perpendicularly inserted into the starboard gunwale 
near the how, for the purpose of furnishing a rest for the wooden 
extremity of the harpoon, whose other naked, barbed end slopingly 
projects from the prow. Thereby the weapon is instantly at hand 
to its hurler, who snatches it up as readily from its rest as a back- 
woodsman swings his rifle from the wall. It is customary to have two 
harpoons reposing in the crotch, respectively called the first and 
second irons. 

But these two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected 
with the line; the object being this: to dart them both, if possible, one 
instantly after the other into the same whale ; so that if, in the coming 
drag, one should draw out, the other may still retain a hold. It 
is a doubling of the chances. But it very often happens that owing to 
the instantaneous, violent, convulsive running of the whale upon receiv- 
ing the first iron, it becomes impossible for the harpooneer, however 
lightning-like in his movements, to pitch the second iron into him. 
Nevertheless, as the second iron is already connected with the line, 
and the line is running, hence that weapon must, at all events, he antici- 
patingly tossed out of the boat, somehow and somewhere; else the 
most terrible jeopardy would involve all hands. Tumbled into the 
water, it accordingly is in such cases; the spare coils of box-line 
(mentioned in a preceding chapter) making this feat, in most instances, 
prudently practicable. But this critical act is not always unattended 
with the saddest and most fatal casualties. 

Furthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown 
overboard, it henceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror, skit- 
tishly curveting about both boa/t and whale, entangling the lines, 
or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions. 
Nor, in general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is fairly 
captured and a corpse. 

Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all en- 
gaging one unusually strong, active, and knowing whale ; when owing 
to these qualities in him, as well as to the thousand concurring accidents 
of such an audacious enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be 
simultaneously dangling about him. For, of course, each boat is 
supplied with several harpoons to bend on to the line should the first one 


268 


MOBY DICK; OR 

be ineffectually darted without recovery. All these particulars are 
faithfully narrated here, as they will not fail to elucidate several most 
important, however intricate passages, in scenes hereafter to be painted. 


CHAPTER LXIII 
stubb's supper 

Stubb's whale had been killed some distance from the ship. It was 
a calm; so, forming a tandem of three boats, we commenced the slow 
business of towing the trophy to the Pequod. And now, as we eighteen 
men with our thirty-six arms, and one hundred and eighty thumbs 
and fingers, slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish 
corpse in the sea; and it seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long 
intervals; good evidence was hereby furnished of the enormousness 
of the mass we moved. For, upon the great canal of Hang-Ho, or 
whatever they call it, in China, four or five labourers on the footpath 
will draw a bulky freighted junk at the rate of a mile an hour; but 
this grand argosy we towed heavily forged along, as if laden with pig- 
lead in bulk. 

Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod’ s 
main-rigging dimly guided our way; till drawing nearer we saw 
Ahab dropping one of several more lanterns over the bulwarks. Va- 
cantly eyeing the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual 
orders for securing it for the night, and then handing his lantern to 
a seaman, went his way into the cabin, and did not come forward again 
until morning. 

Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had 
evinced his customary activity, to call it so ; yet now that the creature 
was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience* or despair, seemed 
working in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that 
Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a thousand other whales 
were brought to his ship, all that would not one jot advance his grand 
monomaniac object. Very soon you would have thought from the 
sound on the Pequod’ s decks, that all hands were preparing to cast 
anchor in the deep ; for heavy chains are being dragged along the deck, 


269 


THE WHITE WHALE 

and thrust rattling out of the port-holes. But by those clanking links, 
the vast corpse itself, not the ship, is to be moored. Tied by the head 
to the stem, and by the tail to the bows, the whale now lies with its 
black hull to the vessel’s, and seen through the darkness of the night, 
which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the two — ship and whaje 
— seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof one reclines 
while the other remains standing . 1 

If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at least so far as could be 
known on deck, Stubb, his second mate, flushed with conquest, be- 
trayed an unusual but still good-natured excitement. Such an un- 
wonted bustle was he in, that the staid Starbuck, his official superior, 
quietly resigned to him for the time the sole management of affairs. 
One small, helping cause of all this liveliness in Stubb was soon made 
strangely manifest. Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat in- 
temperately fond of the whale as a flavourish thing to his palate. 

“A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, 
and cut me one from his small !” 

Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a 
general thing, and according to the great military maxim, make the 
enemy defray the current expenses of the war (at least before realising 
the proceeds of the voyage), yet now and then you find some of these 
Nantucketers who have a genuine relish for that particular part of 
the Sperm Whale designated by Stubb ; comprising the tapering extrem- 
ity of the body. 

About midnight that steak was cut and cooked ; and lighted by two 
lanterns of Sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper at 

1 A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most 
reliable hold which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside, 
is by the flukes or tail; and as from its greater density that part is relatively 
heavier than any other (excepting the side-fins), its flexibility even in death, 
causes it to sink low beneath the surface; so that with the hand you cannot 
got at it from the boat, in order to put the chain round it. But this difficulty 
is ingeniously overcome: a small, strong line is prepared with a wooden float 
at its outer end, and a weight in its middle, while the other end is secured 
to the ship. By adroit management the wooden float is made to rise on the 
other side of the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is 
readily made to follow suit: and being slipped along the body, is at last 
locked fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the point of junction with 
its broad flukes or lobes. 


270 


MOBY DICK; OR 

the capstan-head, as if the capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb 
the only banqueter on whale’s flesh that night. Mingling their mum- 
blings with his own mastications, thousands and thousands of sharks, 
swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. 
The few sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp 
slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the 
sleepers’ hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them (as 
before you heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and 
turning over on their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces 
of the whale of the bigness of a human head. This particular feat 
of the shark seems all but miraculous. How, at such an apparently 
unassailable surface, they contrive to gouge out such symmetrical 
mouthfuls, remains a part of the universal problem of all things. The 
mark they thus leave on the whale may best be likened to the hollow 
made by a carpenter in countersinking for a screw. 

Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a. sea-fight, 
sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like 
hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to 
bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them ; and though, while 
the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving 
each other’s life meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the 
sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving 
away under the table at the dead meat ; and though, were you to turn 
the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same 
thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties ; 
and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships 
crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in 
case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently 
buried ; and though one or two other like instances might be set down, 
touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most 
socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no con- 
ceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless 
numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead 
Sperm whale, moored by night to a whale ship at sea. If you have 
never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety 
of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil. 


THE WHITE WHALE 


271 


But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that 
was going on so nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the smacking 
of his own epicurean lips. 

“Cook, cook ! — where’s that old Fleece ?” he cried at length, widen- 
ing his legs still further, as if to form a mote secure base for his sup- 
per ; and, at the same time darting his fork into the dish, as if stabbing 
with his lance; “cook, you cook! — sail this way, cook!” 

The old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously 
roused from his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came 
shambling along from his galley, for, like many old blacks, there was 
something the matter with his knee-pans, which he did not keep well 
scoured like his other pans ; this old Fleece, as they called him, came 
shuffling and limping along, assisting his step with his tongs, which, 
after a clumsy fashion, were made of straightened iron hoops ; this old 
Ebony floundered along, and in obedience to the world of command, 
came to a dead stop on the opposite side of Stubb’s sideboard; when, 
with both hands folded before him, and resting on his two-legged cane, 
he bowed his arched back still further over, at the same time sideways 
inclining his head, so as to bring his best ear into play. 

“Cook,” said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his 
mouth, “don’t you think this steak is rather overdone? You’ve been 
beating this steak too much, cook ; it’s too tender'. Don’t I always say 
that to be good, a whale-steak must be tough? -There are those sharks 
now over the side, don’t you see they prefer it tough and rare ? What 
a shindy they are kicking up! Cook, go and talk to ’em; tell ’em 
they are welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but 
they must keep quiet. Hang me, if I can hear my voice. Away, 
cook, and deliver my message. Here, take this lantern,” snatching one 
from his sideboard; “now then, go and preach to ’em!” 

Sullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the 
deck to the bulwarks ; and then, with one hand dropping his light low 
over the sea, so as to get a good view of his congregation, with the 
other hand he solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the 
side in a mumbling voice began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, 
softly crawling behind, overheard all that was said. 

“Fellow-critters: I’se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat 


272 


MOBY DICK; OR 

dam noise dare. You hear? Stop dat dam smackin’ ob de lip! 
Massa Stubb say dat you can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, 
but by Gor ! you must stop dat dam racket ! ” 

“Cook,” here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sud- 
den slap on the shoulder, — “Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn’t 
swear that way when your preaching. That’s no way to convert sin- 
ners, cook!” 

“Who dat? Den preach to him yourself,” sullenly turning to go. 

“No, cook; go on, go on.” 

“Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters”: — 

“Right !” exclaimed Stubb approvingly ; “coax ’em to it ; try that,” 
and Fleece continued. 

“Dough you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay 
to you, fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness — ’top dat dam slappin’ 
ob de tail! How you tink to hear, spose you keep up such a dam 
slappin’ and bitin’ dare?” 

“Cook,” cried Stubb, collaring him, “I won’t have that swearing. 
Talk to ’em gentlemanly.” 

Once more the sermon proceeded. 

“Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don’t blame ye so much for; 
dat is natur, and can’t be helped ; but to gobern dat wicket natur, dat 
is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, 
why den you be angel ; for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well 
gobemed. Now, look here, bred’ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a-help- 
ing yourselves from dat whale. Don’t be tearin’ de blubber out your 
neighbour’s mout, I say. Is not one shark dood right as toder to dat 
whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat 
whale belong to some one else. I know some o’ you has berry brig 
mout, brigger dan oders ; but den de brig mouts sometimes has de small 
bellies; so dat the brigness ob de mout is not to swaller wid, but to 
bite off de blubber for de small fry ob sharks, dat can’t get into de 
scrouge to help demselves.” 

“Well done, old Fleece!” cried Stubb, “that’s Christianity; go on.” 

“No use goin’ on ; de dam willians will keep a scourgin’ and slappin’ 
each oder, Massa Stubb ; dey don’t hear one word ; no use a-preachin’ 
to such dam g’uttons as you call ’em, till dare bellies is full, and dare 


THE WHITE WHALE 273 

bellies is bottomless; and when dey do get ’em full, dey won’t hear 
you den; for den dey sink in de sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and 
can’t hear not’ing at all, no more, for eber and eber.” 

“Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion; so give the bless- 
ing, Fleece, and I’ll away to my supper.” 

Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised his 
shrill voice, and cried — 

“Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you 
can ; fill your dam bellies ’till they bust — and den die.” 

“How, cook,” said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; “stand 
just where you stood before, there, over against me, and pay particular 
attention.” 

“All ’dention,” said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in 
the desired position. 

“Well,” said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile ; “I shall now 
go back to the subject of this steak. In the first place, how old are you, 
cook ?” 

“What dat do wid de ’teak?” said the old black testily. 

“Silence! How old are you, cook?” 

“ ’Bout ninety, dey say,” he gloomily muttered. 

“And you have lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, 
cook, and don’t know yet how to cook a whale-steak?” rapidly bolting 
another mouthful at the last word, so that that morsel seemed a contin- 
uation of the question. “Where were you born, cook?” 

“ ’Hind de hatchway, in ferry-boat, goin’ ober de Roanoke.” 

“Born in a ferry-boat! That’s queer, too. But I want to know 
what country you were bora in, cook ?” 

“Didn’t I say de Roanoke country ?” he cried sharply. 

“Ho, you didn’t, cook; but I’ll tell you what I’m coming to, cook. 
You must go home and be born over again; you don’t know how to 
cook a whale-steak yet.” 

“Bress my soul, if I cook nodder one,” he growled angrily, turning 
round to depart. 

“Come back, cook ; — here, hand me those tongs ; — now take that bit 
of steak there, and tell me if you think that steak cooked as it should 
be ? Take it, I say” — holding the tongs towards him — “take it, and 
taste it.” 


274 


MOBY DICK; OR 

Faintly smacking his withered lips over it for a moment, the old negro 
muttered, “Best cooked ’teak I eber taste; joosy, berry joosy.” 

“Cook,” said Stubb, squaring himself once more; “do you belong 
to the church?” 

“Passed one once in Cape Down,” said the old man sullenly. 

“And you have once in your life passed a holy church in Cape Town, 
where you doubtless overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers 
as his beloved fellow-creatures, have you, cook! And yet you come 
here, and tell me such a dreadful lie as you did just now, eh?” said 
Stubb. “Where do you expect to go to, cook ?” 

“Go to bed berry soon,” he mumbled, half -turning as he spoke. 

“Avast! heave-to! I mean when you die, cook. It’s an awful 
question. Now what’s your answer?” 

“When dis old brack man dies,” said the negro slowly, changing his 
whole air and demeanour, “he hisself won’t go nowhere ; but some hressed 
angel will come and fetch him.” 

“Fetch him — and fetch him where?” 

“Up dere,” said Fleece, holding his tongs straight over his head, 
and keeping it there very solemnly. 

‘“So, then, you expect to go up into our maintop, do you, cook, when 
you are dead?” 

“Didn’t say dat t’all,” said Fleece, again in the sulks. 

“You said up there, didn’t you? and now look yourself, and see 
where your tongs are pointing. Drop your tongs, cook, and heal? 
my orders. Do ye hear ? Hold your hat in one hand, and clap t’other 
a’top of your heart, when I’m giving my orders, cook. What! that 
your heart, there? — that’s your gizzard! Aloft! aloft! — that’s it — 
now you have it. Hold it there now, and pay attention.” 

“All ’dention,” said the old black, with both hands placed as desired, 
vainly wriggling his grizzled head, as if to get both ears in front at 
one and the same time. 

“Well then, cook, you see this whale-steak of yours was so very had, 
that I have put it out of sight as soon as possible ; you see that, don’t 
you? Well, for the future, when you cook another whale-steak for 
my private table here, the capstan, I’ll tell you what to do so as not to 
spoil it by overdoing. Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live 


275 


THE WHITE WHALE 

coal to it with the other ; that done, dish it ; d’ye hear ? And now to- 
morrow, cook, when we are cutting-in the fish, be sure you stand by to 
get the tips of his fins ; have them put in pickle. As for the ends of 
the flukes, have them soused, cook. There, now, you may go.” 

But Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled. 
“Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch. 
D’ye hear ? away you sail, then — Halloa ! stop ! make a how before you 
go — Avast heaving again ! Whale halls for breakfast — don’t forget.” 

“Wish, by Gor ! whale eat him, ’stead of him eat whale. I’m bressed 
if he ain’t more a shark dan Massa Shark hisself,” muttered the old 
man, limping away: with which sage ejaculation he went to his ham- 
mock. 


CHAPTER LXIY 

THE WHALE AS A DISH 

That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, 
and like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems 
so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history 
and philosophy of it. 

It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right 
Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large 
prices there. Also, that in Henry vmth’s time, a certain cook of the 
court obtained a handsome reward for inventing an admirable sauce 
to be eaten with barbecued porpoises, which, you remember, are a 
species of whale. Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine 
eating. The meat is made into balls about the size of billiard balls, 
and being well seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle halls 
or veal balls. The old monks of Dunfermline were very fond of them. 
They had a great porpoise grant from the crown. 

The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all 
hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him; 
but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred 
feet long, it takes away your appetite. Only the most unprejudiced 
of men like Stubb, nowadays partake of cooked whales ; but the Esqui- 


276 


MOBY DICK; OR 

maux are not so fastidious. We all know how they live upon whales, 
and have rare old vintages of prime old train oil. Zogranda, one of 
their most famous doctors, recommends strips of blubber for infants, 
as being exceedingly juicy and nourishing. And this reminds me 
that certain Englishmen, who long ago were accidentally left in Green- 
land by a whaling vessel — that these men actually lived for several 
months on the mouldy scraps of whales which had been left ashore 
after trying out the blubber. Among the Dutch whalemen these scraps 
are called “fritters” ; which, indeed, they greatly resemble, being brown 
and crisp, and smelling something like old Amsterdam housewives’ 
doughnuts or oly-cooks, when fresh. They have such an eatable look 
that the most self-denying stranger can hardly keep his hands off. 

But what further depreciates the whale as a civilised dish, is his 
exceeding richness. He is the great prize ox of the sea, too fat to 
be delicately good. Look at his hump, which would be as fine eating 
as the buffalo’s (which is esteemed a rare dish), were it not such a solid 
pyramid of fat. But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that 
is; like the transparent, half-jellied white meat of a cocoanut in the 
third month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute for 
butter. Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing 
it into some other substance, and then partaking of it. In the long 
try-watches of the night it is a common thing for the seamen to dip 
their ship-biscuit into the huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. 
Many a good supper have I thus made. 

In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine 
dish. The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two 
plump, whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two 
large puddings), they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a 
most delectable mess, in flavour somewhat resembling calves’ head, 
which is quite a dish among some epicures ; and every one knows that 
some young bucks among the epicures, by continually dining upon 
calves’ brains, by and by get to have a little brains of their own, so as 
to be able to tell a calf’s head from their own heads; which, indeed, 
requires uncommon discrimination. And that is the reason why a 
young buck with an intelligent-looking calf’s head before him, is some- 
how one of the saddest sights you can see. The head looks a sort of 
reproachfully at him, with an “Et tu, Brute!” expression. 


THE WHITE WHALE 277 

It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unc- 
tuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence ; 
that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before men- 
tioned, i. e., that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, 
and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever 
murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; 
and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have 
been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the 
meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds star- 
ing up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not the sight take 
a tooth out of the cannibals jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? 

But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he ? and that is 
adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my 
civilised and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is 
that handle made of? — what but the bones of the brother of the very 
ox you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after de- 
vouring that fat goose ? With a feather of the same fowl. And with 
what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of 
Cruelty to Ganders formally indite his circulars ? It is only within the 
last month or two that society passed a resolution to patronise 
nothing but steel pens. 


CHAPTEB LXV 

THE SHARK MASSACRE 

When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long 
and weary toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general 
thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting 
him in. For that business is an exceedingly laborious one; is not 
very soon completed; and requires all hands to set about it. There- 
fore, the common usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm a’lee; 
and then send every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the 
reservation that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept ; that is, 
two and two for an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall paount 
tlie deck to see that all goes well, 


278 


MOBY DICK; OR 

But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will 
not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather 
round the moored carcass, that were he left so for six hours, say, on 
a stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning. 
In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so 
largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably 
diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, 
a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to 
tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the 
present case with the Pequod’s sharks; though, to be sure, any man 
unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, 
would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, 
and those sharks the maggots in it. 

Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor- watch after his supper 
was concluded ; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle sea- 
man came on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks ; 
for immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lower- 
ing three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid 
sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an 
incesssant murdering of the sharks , 1 by striking the keen steel deep 
into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy 
confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not 
always hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of 
the incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only 
at each other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, 
and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over 
again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. 
Nor was this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and 
ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality 

1 The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel ; is 
about the bigness of a man’s spread hand; and in general shape corresponds 
to the garden implement after which it is named ; only its sides are perfectly 
flat, and its upper end considerably narrower than the lower. This weapon 
is always kept as sharp as possible; and when being used is occasionally 
honed, just like a razor. In its socket, a stiff pole, from twenty to thirty 
feet long, is inserted for a handle. 


279 


THE WHITE WHALE 

seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be 
called the individual life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck 
for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost took poor Quee- 
queg’s hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his mur- 
derous jaw. 


CHAPTER LXVI 

CUTTING-IN - 

It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed ! Ex-officio 
professors of Sabbath-breaking are all whalemen. The ivory Pequod 
was turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher. You 
would have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the 
sea gods. 

In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other ponder- 
ous things comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted green, and 
which no single man can possibly lift — this vast bunch of grapes was 
swayed up to the maintop and firmly lashed to the lower masthead, 
the strongest point anywhere above a ship’s deck. The end 6f the 
hawser-like rope winding through these intricacies, was then conducted 
to the windlass, and the huge lower block of the tackles was swung 
over the whale ; to this block the great blubber hook, weighing some one 
hundred pounds, was attached. And now suspended in stages over the 
side, Starbuck and Stubb, the mates, armed with their long spades, 
began cutting a hole in the body for the insertion of the hook just 
above the nearest of the two side-fins. This done, a broad, semi-circular 
line is cut round the hole, the hook is inserted, and the main body of 
the crew striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving in one 
dense crowd at the windlass. When instantly, the entire ship careens 
over on her side; every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads of an old 
house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted 
mastheads to the sky. More and more she leans over to the whale, while 
every gasping heave of the windlass is answered by a helping heave 
from the billows; till at last, a swift, startling snap is heard; with a 
great swash the ship rolls upwards and backwards from the whale, and 
the triumphant tackle rises into sight dragging after it the disengaged 


280 


MOBY DICK; OR 

semi-circular end of the first strip of blubber. Now as the blubber 
envelops the whale precisely as the rind does an orange, so is it 
stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped 
by spiralising it. For the strain constantly kept up by the windlass 
continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water, and as 
the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the 
“scarf,” simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the 
mates ; and just as fast as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very 
act itself, it is all the time bejng hoisted higher and higher aloft till 
its upper end grazes the maintop; the men at the windlass then cease 
heaving, and for a moment or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass 
sways to and fro as if let down from the sky, and every one present 
must take good heed to dodge it when it swings, else it may box his ears 
and pitch him headlong overboard. 

One of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen 
weapon called a boarding-sword, and watching his chance he dexter- 
ously slices out a considerable hole in the lower part of the swaying 
mass. Into this hole, the end of the second alternating great tackle 
is then hooked so as to retain a hold upon the blubber, in order to pre- 
pare for what follows. Whereupon, this accomplished swordsman, 
warning all hands to stand off, once more makes a scientific dash at 
the mass, and with a few sidelong, desperate, lunging slices, severs 
it completely in twain ; so that while the short lower part is still fast, 
the long upper strip, called a blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all 
ready for lowering. The heavers forward now resume their song, and 
while the one tackle is peeling and hoisting a second strip from the 
whale, the other is slowing slackened away, and down goes the first 
strip through the main hatchway right beneath, into an unfurnished 
parlour called the blubber-room. Into this twilight apartment sundry 
nimble hands keep coiling away the long blanket-piece as if it were a 
great live mass of plaited serpents. And thus the work proceeds ; the 
two tackles hoisting and lowering simultaneously ; both whale and wind- 
lass heaving, the heavers singing, the blubber room gentlemen coiling, 
the mates scarfing, the ship straining, and all hands swearing occasion- 
ally, by way of assuaging the general friction, 


THE WHITE WHALE 

CHAPTER LXVII 


281 


THE BLANKET 

I have given no small attention to that not nnvexed subject, the skin 
of the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced 
whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion 
remains unchanged ; hut it is only an opinion. 

The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale ? Already 
you know what his blubber is. That blubber is something of the 
consistence of firm, close-grained beef, hut tougher, more elastic and 
compact, and ranges from eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in 
thickness. 

Now, however preposterous it may first seem to talk of any creature’s 
skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point 
of fact these are no arguments against such a presumption; because 
you cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer from the whale’s 
body but that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of 
any animal, if reasonably dense, what can that he but the skin ? True, 
from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off with 
your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resem- 
bling the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and 
soft as satin ; that is, previous to being dried, when it not only contracts 
and thickens, hut becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several 
such dried bits, which I use for marks in my whalebooks. It is trans- 
parent, as I said before ; and being laid upon the printed page, I have 
sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying in- 
fluence. At any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their 
own spectacles, as you may say. But what I am driving at here is this. 
That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests 
the entire body of the whale, is not so much to he regarded as the skin of 
the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply 
ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is 
thinner and more tender than the skin of the new-born child. But no 
more of this. 

Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this 
skin, as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the hulk of 


282 


MOBY DICK; OR 

one hundred barrels of oil ; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, 
or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three-fourths, 
and not the entire substance of the coat ; some idea may hence be had 
of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose mere 
integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. 'Reckoning ten barrels 
to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters 
of the stuff of the whale’s skin. 

In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among 
the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over 
obliquely crossed and recrossed with numerous straight marks in thick 
array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But 
these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance 
above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it as if they were en- 
graved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the 
quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but 
afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical ; 
that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids 
hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present con- 
nection. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one 
Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing 
the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades 
on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, 
the mystic marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the 
Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other 
phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not 
seldom displays the back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great 
part of the regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude 
scratches, altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that 
those New England rocks on the sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to 
bear the marks of violent scraping contact with vast floating icebergs — 
I should say, that those rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm 
Whale in this particular. It also seems to me that such scratches in 
the whale are probably made by hostile contact with other whales; 
for I have most remarked them in the large, full grown bulls of the 
species. 

A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber 
of the whale. It has already been said, that it is stripped from him in 


283 


THE WHITE WHALE 

long pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, tbis one is very 
happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his 
blubber as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian 
poncho slipped over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by 
reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled 
to keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and 
tides. What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shud- 
dering, icy seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? 
True, other fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean 
waters; but these, be it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, 
whose very bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves 
under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before 
an inn fire ; whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. 
Freeze his blood and he dies. How wonderful is it then — except after 
explanation — that this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as 
indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that he should be found 
at home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, 
when seamen fall overboard, they are sometimes found, months after- 
wards, perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly 
is found glued in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has 
been proved by experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer 
than that of a Borneo negro in summer. 

It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong in- 
dividual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue 
of interior spaciousness. Oh, man ! admire and model thyself after the 
whale ! Ho thou, too, remain warm among ice. Ho thou, too, live 
in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy 
blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like 
the great whale, retain, O man ! in all seasons a temperature of thine 
own. 

But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things ! Of erec- 
tions, how few are domed like St. Peter’s ! of creatures, how few vast 
as the whale ! 


284 


MOBY DICK; OR 

CHAPTEK LXVIII 


THE FUNERAL 

“Haul in the chains ! Let the carcase go astern !” 

The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body 
of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed 
in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal. 
Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it tom and 
splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with repacious 
flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting pon- 
iards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats farther 
and farther from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seems 
square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous 
din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous 
sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the 
fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great 
mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives. 

There’s a most doleful and most mocking funeral ! The sea-vultures 
all in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or 
speckled. In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I 
ween, if peradventure he had needed it ; but upon the banquet of his 
funeral they most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vulturism of earth ! 
from which not the mightiest whale is free. 

Hor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost 
survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of- 
war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscur- 
ing the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating 
in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it ; straightway the 
whale’s unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log 
— shoals, rocks and breakers hereabouts beware! And for years 
afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly 
sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there 
when a stick was held. There’s your law of precedents; there’s your 
utility of traditions ; there’s the story of your obstinate survival of old 
beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the 
air! 


285 


THE WHITE WHALE 

Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror 
to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerful panic to the 
world. 

Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts 
than the Cock Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who 
believe in them. 


CHAPTER LXIX 

THE SPHINX 

It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping 
the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the 
Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced 
whale surgeons very much pride themselves: and not without reason. 

Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a 
neck ; on the contrary, where his head ‘and body seem to join, there, in 
that very place, is the thickest part of him. Remember, also, that the 
surgeon must operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening be- 
tween him and his subject, and that subject almost hidden in a dis- 
coloured, rolling, and oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea. Bear in 
mind, too, that under these untoward circumstances he has to cut many 
feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneaneous manner, without 
so much as getting one single peep into the ever-contracting gash thus 
made, he must skillfully steer clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts, 
and exactly divide the spine at a critical point hard by its insertion into 
the skull. Do you not marvel, then, at Stubb’s boast, that he demanded 
but ten minutes to behead a sperm whale ? 

When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a 
cable till the body is stripped. That done, if it belong to a small whale 
it is hoisted on deck to be deliberately disposed of. But, with a full- 
grown leviathan this is impossible; for the Sperm Whale’s head em- 
braces nearly one-third of his entire bulk, and completely to suspend 
such a burden as that, even by the immense tackles of a whaler, this 
were as vain a thing as to attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jewellers’ 
scales. 

The Pequod’s whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the 


286 


MOBY DICK; OR 

head was hoisted against the ship’s side — about half-way out of the 
sea, so that it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its native ele- 
ment. And there with the strained craft steeply leaning over to it, 
by reason of the enormous downward drag from the lower masthead, 
and every yardarm on that side projecting like a crane over the waves; 
there, that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod’s waist like the 
giant Holofemes’s from the girdle of Judith. 

When this last task was accomplished it was noon, and the ^seamen 
went below to their dinner. Silence reigned over the before tumultuous 
but now deserted deck. An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow 
lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves 
upon the sea. 

A short space elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone 
from his cabin. Taking a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused 
to gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the main-chains he took 
Stubb’s long spade — still remaining there after the whale’s decapita- 
tion — and striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended mass, 
placed its other end crutch-wise under one arm, and so stood leaning 
over with eyes attentively fixed on this head. 

It was a black and hooded head ; and hanging there in the midst of 
so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphinx’s in the desert. “Speak, thou 
vast and venerable heap,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished 
with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, 
mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, 
thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon wdiich the upper sun now 
gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. .Where unrecorded 
names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot ; where in her 
murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of 
the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most fa- 
miliar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went ; hast slept 
by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives 
to lay them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from 
their flaming .ship ; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave ; 
true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st 
the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; 
for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw ; and his 


THE WHITE WHALE 287 

murderers still sailed on unharmed — while swift lightnings shivered 
the neighbouring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to 
outstretched, longing arms. 

“Sail ho !” cried a triumphant* voice from the mainmast head. 

“Aye? Well, now, that’s cheering,” cried Ahab, suddenly erecting 
himself, while whole thunderclouds swept aside from his brow. “That 
lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man — 
Where away ?” 

“Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her 
breeze to us!” 

“Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along 
that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and 
O soul of man ! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies ! 
not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, hut has its cunning 
duplicate in mind.” 


CHAPTER LXX 
the jeroboam’s story 

Hahd in hand, ship and breeze blew on; hut the breeze came faster 
than the ship, and soon the Pequod began to rock. 

By and by, through the glass the stranger’s boats and manned mast- 
heads proved her a whale ship. But as she was so far to windward, 
and shooting by, apparently making a passage to some other ground, 
the Pequod could not hope to reach her. So the signal was set to 
see what response would he made. 

Here he it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships 
of the American Whale Fleet have such a private signal; all which 
signals being collected in a book with the names of the respective 
vessels attached, every captain is provided with it. Thereby, the 
whale commanders are enabled to recognise each other upon the ocean, 
even at considerable distances and with no small facility. 

The Pequod' s signal was at last responded to by the strangers 
setting her own; which proved the ship to be the Jeroboam* of Nan- 
tucket. Squaring her yards, she bore down, ranged abeam under 
the Pequod' s lee, and lowered a boat ; it soon drew nigh ; hut, as the side- 


288 


MOBY DICK; OR 

ladder was being rigged by Starbuck’s order to accommodate the visit- 
ing captain, the stranger in question waved his hand from his boat’s 
stern in token of that proceeding being entirely unnecessary. It 
turned out that the Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board, 
and that Mayhew, her captain, was fearful of infecting the Pequod' s 
company. For, though himself and boat’s crew remained untainted, 
and though his ship was half a rifle-shot off, and an incorruptible sea 
and air rolling and flowing between; yet conscientiously adhering 
to the timid quarantine of the land, he peremptorily refused to come 
into direct contact with the Pequod. 

But this did by no means prevent all communication. Preserving 
an interval of some few yards between itself and the ships, the Jero- 
boam's boat by the occasional use of its oars contrived to keep parallel 
to the Pequod , as she heavily forged through the sea (for by this 
time it blew very fresh), with her maintop sail aback; though, indeed, 
at times by the sudden onset of a large rolling wave, the boat would be 
pushed some way ahead; but would be soon skilfully brought to her 
proper bearings again. Subject to this, and other like interruptions 
now and then, a conversation was sustained between the two parties; 
but at intervals not without still another interruption of a very differ- 
ent sort. 

Pulling an oar in* the Jeroboams boat, was a man of singular 
appearance, even in that wild whaling life where individual notabil- 
ities make up all totalities. He was a small, short, youngish man, 
sprinkled all over his face with freckles, and wearing redundant yel- 
low hair. A long-skirted, cabalistically cut coat of a faded walnut 
tinge enveloped him; the overlapping sleeves of which were' rolled 
up on his wrists. A deep, settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes. 

So soon as this figure had been first descried, Stubb had exclaimed 
— “That’s he! that’s he! — the long-togged scaramouch the Town-Ho's 
company told us of!” Stubb here alluded to a strange story told of the 
Jeroboam , and a certain man among her crew, some time previous 
when the Pequod spoke the Town-Ho. According to this account and 
what was subsequently learned, it seemed that the scaramouch in 
question had gained a wonderful ascendency over almost everybody 
in the Jeroboam. His story was this: 

He had been originally nurtured among the crazy society of Hesk- 


289 


THE WHITE WHALE 

yeuna Shakers, where he had been a great prophet; in their cracked, 
secret meetings, having several times descended from heaven by the 
way of a trap-door, announcing the -speedy opening of the seventh 
vial, which he carried in his vest-pocket; but, which, instead of con- 
taining gunpowder, was supposed to be charged with laudanum. 
A strange, apostolic whim having seized him, he had left Neskyeuna 
for Nantucket, where, with that cunning peculiar to craziness, he as- 
sumed a steady, common-sense exterior, and offered himself as a 
green-hand candidate for the Jeroboams whaling voyage. They en- 
gaged him ; but straightway upon the ship’s getting out of sight of land, 
his insanity broke out in a‘ freshet. He announced himself as the 
archangel Gabriel, and commanded the captain to jump overboard. 
He published his manifesto, whereby he set himself forth as the de- 
liverer of the isles of the sea and vicar-general of all Oceanica. The 
unflinching earnestness with which he declared these things; — the 
dark, daring play of his sleepless, excited imagination, and all the 
preternatural terrors’ of real delirium, united to invest this Gabriel in 
th3 minds of the majority of the ignorant crew, with an atmosphere of 
sacredness. Moreover, they were afraid of him. As such a man, 
however, was not of much practical use in the ship, especially as he 
refused to work except when he pleased, the incredulous captain 
would fain have been rid of him; but apprised that that individual’s 
intention was ter land him in the first convenient port, the archangel 
forthwith opened all his seals and vials — devoting the ship and all 
hands to unconditional perdition, in case this intention was carried 
out. So strongly did he work upon his disciples among the crew, that 
at last in a* body they went to the captain and told him if Gabriel was 
sent from the ship^ not a man of them would remain. He was there- 
fore forced to relinquish his plan. Nor would they permit Gabriel 
to be any way maltreated, say or do what he would; so that it came 
to pass that Gabriel had the complete freedom of the ship. The 
consequence of all this was, that the archangel cared little or nothing 
for the captain and mates; and since the epidemic had broken out 
he carried a higher hand than ever; declaring that the plague, as he 
called it, was his sole command; nor should it be stayed but accord- 
ing to his good pleasure. The sailors, mostly poor devils, cringed, 


290 


MOBY DICK; OR 

and some of them fawned before him ; in obedience to his instructions, 
sometimes rendering him personal homage, as to a god. Such things 
may seem incredible; but, however wondrous, they are true. Nor 
is the history of fanatics half so striking in respect to the measureless 
self-deception of the fanatic himself, as his measureless power of 
deceiving and bedevilling so many others. But it was time to return 
to the Pequod. 

“I fear not thy epidemic, man,” said Ahab from the bulwarks, to 
Captain Mayhew, who stood in the boat’s stern; “come on board.” 

But now Gabriel started to his feet. 

“Think, think of the fevers, yellow and bilious ! Beware of the 
horrible plague!” 

“Gabriel, Gabriel !” cried Captain Mayhew ; “thou must either ” 

But that instant a headlong wave shot the boat far ahead, and its 
seethings drowned all speech. 

“Hast thou seen the White Whale?” demanded Ahab, when the 
boat drifted back. 

“Think, think of thy whale boat, stoven and sunk! Beware of 
the horrible tail!” 

“I tell thee again, Gabriel, that ” But again the boat tore ahead 

as if dragged by fiends. Nothing was said for some moments, while 
a succession of riotous waves rolled by, which by one of those occa- 
sional caprices of the seas were tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, 
the hoisted sperm whale’s head jogged about very violently, and 
Gabriel was seen eyeing it with rather more apprehensiveness than 
his self-styled archangel nature seemed to warrant. 

When this interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story 
concerning Moby Dick; not, however, without frequent interruptions 
from Gabriel, whenever his name was mentioned, and the crazy sea 
that seemed leagued with him. 

It seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon 
speaking a whale ship, her people were reliably apprised of the ex- 
istence of Moby Dick, and the havoc he had made. Greedily suck- 
ing in this intelligence, Gabriel solemnly warned the captain 
against attacking the White Whale, in case the monster should be seen ; 
in his gibbering insanity, pronouncing the White Whale to be no less 


291 


THE WHITE WHALE 

a being than the Shaker God incarnated; the Shakers receiving the 
Bible. But when, some year or two afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly 
sighted from the mastheads, Macey, the chief mate, burned with ardour 
to encounter him; and the captain himself being not unwilling to let 
him have the opportunity despite all the archangel’s denunciations 
and forewarnings, Macey succeeded in persuading five men to man his 
boat. With them he pushed off; and, after much weary pulling, and 
many perilous, unsuccessful onsets, he at last succeeded in getting 
one iron fast. Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to the main-royal mast- 
head, was tossing one arm in frantic^ gestures, and hurling forth 
prophecies of speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants of his divinity. 
Now, while Macey, the mate, was standing up in his boat’s bow, and 
with all the reckless energy of his tribe was venting his wild exclama- 
tions upon the whale, and essaying to get a fair chance for his poised 
lance, lo! a broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its quick, fan- 
ning motion, temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies of the 
oarsmen. Next instant, the luckless mate, so full of furious life, 
was smitten bodily into the air, and making a long arc in his descent, 
fell into the sea at the distance of about fifty yards. Not a chip of 
the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any of the oarsmen’s head; but 
the mate for ever sank. 

(It is well to parenthesise here, that of the fatal accidents in the 
Sperm Whale Fishery, this kind is perhaps almost as frequent as any. 
Sometimes nothing is injured but the man who is thus annihilated; 
oftener the boat’s bow is knocked off, or the thigh-board, in which the 
headsman stands, is torn from its place and accompanies the body. 
But strangest of all is the circumstance, that in more instances than 
one, when the body has been recovered, not a single mark of violence 
is discernible; the man being stark dead.) 

The whole calamity, with the falling form of Macey, was plainly 
descried from the ship. Raising a piercing shriek — “The vial! the 
vial !” Gabriel called off the terror-stricken crew from the further 
hunting of the whale. This terrible event clothed the archangel with 
added influence; because his credulous disciples believed that he had 
specifically fore-announced it, instead of only making a general 
prophecy, which any one might have done, and so have chanced to hit 


292 MOBY, DICK; OR 

one of many marks in the wide margin allowed. He became a name- 
less terror to the ship. 

Mayhew having concluded the narration, Ahab put such questions to 
him, that the stranger captain could not forbear inquiring whether 
he intended to hunt the White Whale, if opportunity should offer. 
To which Ahab answered — “Aye.” Straightway, then, Gabriel once 
more started to his feet, glaring upon the old man, and vehemently 
exclaimed, with downward pointed finger — “Think, think of the 
blasphemer — dead, and down there ! — beware of the blasphemer’s 
end!” 

Ahab stolidly turned asi^e; then said to Mayhew, “Captain, I 
have just bethought me of my letter-bag; there is a letter for one of 
thy officers, if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the bag.” 

Every whale ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various 
ships, whose delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, 
depends upon the mere chance of encountering them in the four 
oceans. Thus, most letters never reach their mark; and many are 
only received after attaining an age of two and three years or more. 

Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand. It was sorely 
tumbled, damp, and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in 
consequence of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin. Of such a 
letter, Death himself might well have been the post-boy. 

“Canst not read it?” cried Ahab. “Give it me, man. Aye, aye, 
it’s but a dim scrawl; — what’s this?” As he was studying it out, 
'Starbuck took a long cutting-spade pole, and with his knife slightly 
split the end, to insert the letter there, and in that way, hand it 
to the boat, without its coming any closer to the ship. 

Meantime, Ahab holding the letter, muttered, “Mr. Har — yes, Mr. 
Harry — (a woman’s pinny hand,— the man’s wife, I’ll wager) — Aye 
— Mr. Harry Macey, Ship Jeroboam ; — why, it’s Macey, and he’s 
dead!” 

“Poor fellow! poor fellow! and from his wife,” sighed Mayhew; 
“but let me have it.” 

“Hay, keep it thyself,” cried Gabriel to Ahab; “thou are soon going 
that way.” 

“Curse throttle thee!” yelled Ahab. “Captain Mayhew, stand by 


THE WHITE WHALE 293 

now to receive it” ; and taking the fatal missive from Starbuck’s 
hands, he caught it in the slit of the pole, and reached it over towards 
the boat. But as he did so, the oarsmen expectantly desisted from 
rowing ; the boat drifted a little towards the ship’s stern ; so that, as if 
by magic, the letter suddenly ranged along with Gabriel’s eager hand. 
He clutched it in an instant, seized the boat-knife, and impaling the 
letter on it, sent it thus loaded hack into the ship. It fell at Ahab’s 
feet. Then Gabriel shrieked out his comrades to give way with 
their oars, and in that manner the mutinous boat rapidly shot away 
from the Pequod. 

As, after this interlude, the seaman resumed their work upon the 
jacket of the whale, many strange things were hinted in reference to 
this wild affair. 


CHAPTER LXXI 

THE MONKEY-ROPE 

In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, 
there is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. How 
hands are wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There 
is no staying in any one place ; for at one and the same time everything 
has to be done everywhere. It is much the same with him who en- 
deavours the description of the scene. We must now retrace our way 
a little. It was mentioned that upon first breaking ground in the 
whale’s back, the blubber-hook was inserted into the original hole 
there cut by the spades of the mates. But how did so clumsy and 
weighty a mass as that same hook get fixed in that hole? It was in- 
serted there by my particular friend Queequeg, whose duty it was, 
as harpooneer, to descend upon the monster’s hack for the special 
purpose referred to. But in very many cases, circumstances require 
that the harpooneer shall remain on the whale till the whole flensing or 
stripping operation is concluded. The whale, he it observed, lies 
almost entirely submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated 
upon. So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the 
poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the whale, and half in the 
water, as the vast mass revolves like a treadmill beneath him. 


294 


MOBY DICK; OR 

On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured in, the Highland costume 
— a shirt and socks — in which to my eyes, at least, he appeared to un- 
common advantage; and no one had a better chance to observe him, 
as will presently be seen. 

Being the savage’s bowman, that is, the person who pulled the bow- 
oar in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful 
duty to attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble 
upon the dead whale’s back. You have seen Italian organ-boys hold- 
ing a dancing-ape by a long cord. Just so, from the ship’s steep 
side, did I hold Queequeg down there in the sea, by what is tech- 
nically called in the fishery a monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip 
of canvas belted round his waist. 

It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before 
we proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at 
both ends ; fast to Queequeg’ s broad canvas belt ; and fast to my narrow 
leather one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, 
were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then 
both usage and honour demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, 
it should drag me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese 
ligature united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother, 
nor could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the 
hempen bond entailed. 

So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, 
that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to per- 
ceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint-stock com- 
pany of two ; that my free will had received a mortal wound ; and that 
another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into un- 
merited disaster and death. Therefore, I saw that here was a sort 
of interregnum in Providence ; for its even-handed equity never could 
have sanctioned so gross an injustice. And yet still further pon- 
dering — while I jerked him now and then from between the whale and 
the ship, which would threaten to jam him — still further pondering, 
I say, I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation 
of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or 
other, has this Siamese connection with a plurality of other mortals. 
If your banker breaks, you snap ; if your apothecary by mistake sends 


THE WHITE WHALE 


295 


you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by ex- 
ceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous 
other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg’ s monkey-rope heed- 
fully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near 
sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I 
would, I only had the management of one end of it . 1 

I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between 
the whale and the ship — where he would occasionally fall, from the 
incessant rolling and swaying of both. But this was not the only 
jamming jeopardy he was exposed to. Unappalled by the massacre 
made upon them during the night, the sharks now freshly apd more 
keenly allured by the before pent blood which began to flow from 
the carcase — the rabid creatures swarmed round it like bees in a 
beehive. 

And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed 
them aside with his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible 
were it not that, attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise 
miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom touch a man. 

Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a 
ravenous finger in the pie, it is deemed but wise to look sharp to them. 
Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope, with which I now and then 
jerked the poor fellow from too close a vicinity to the maw of what 
seemed a peculiarly ferocious shark — he was provided with still an- 
other protection. Suspended over the side in one of the stages, 
Tashtego and Daggoo continually flourished over his head a couple of 
keen whale-spades, wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as 
they could reach. This procedure of theirs, to be sure, was very dis- 
interested and benevolent of them. They meant Queequeg’s best 
happiness, I admit; but in their hasty zeal to befriend him, and 
from the circumstance that both he and the sharks were at times half 
hidden by the blood-mudded water, those indiscreet spades of theirs 
would come nearer amputating a leg than a tail. But poor Queequeg, 

1 The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod 
that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together. This improve- 
ment upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb, 
in order to afford the imperilled harpooneer the strongest possible guarantee 
for the faithfulness and vigilance pf his monkey-rope holder, 


296 


MOBY DICK; OR 

I suppose, straining and gasping there with that great iron hook — 
poor Queequeg, I suppose only prayed to his Yojo, and gave up his life 
into the hands of his gods. 

“Well, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother,’ ’ thought I, as 
I drew in and then slacked off the rope to every swell of the sea — 
“what matters it, after all ? Are you not the previous image of each 
and all of us men in this whaling world ? That unsounded ocean you 
gasp in,, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, yuur friends; 
and what between sharks and spades you are in a sad pickle and 
peril, poor lad.” 

But courage! there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For 
now, as with blue lips and bloodshot eyes the exhausted savage at last 
climbs up the chains and stands all dripping and involuntarily trem- 
bling over the side; the steward advances, and with a benevolent, 
consolatory glance hands him — what ? Some hot Cognac ? No ! hands 
him, ye gods ! hands him a cup of tepid ginger and water ! 

“Ginger? Do I smell ginger?” suspiciously asked Stubb, coming 
near. “Yes, this must be ginger,” peering into the as yet untasted 
cup. Then standing as if incredulous for a while, he calmly* walked 
towards the astonished steward slowly saying, “Ginger? ginger? and 
will you have the goodness to tell me, Mr. Dough-Boy, where lies the 
virtue of ginger ? Ginger ? is ginger the sort of fuel you use, Dough- 
Boy, to kindle a Are in this shivering cannibal? Ginger! — what the 
devil is ginger ? — sea-coal ? — firewood ? — lucif er matches ? — tinder ? — 
gun-powder ? — what the devil is ginger, I say, that you offer this cup 
to our poor Queequeg here ? 

“There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this 
business,” he suddenly added, now approaching Starbuck, who had 
just come from forward. “Will you look at that kannakin sir; smell 
of it, if you please.” Then watching the mate’s countenance, he added : 
“The steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and 
jalap to Queequeg, there, this instant off the whale. Is the steward 
an apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bel- 
lows by which he blows back the breath into a half-drowned man ?” 

“I trust not,” said Starbuck ; “it is poor stuff enough.” 

“Aye, aye, steward,” cried Stubb, “we’ll teach you to drug a har- 


©C1K 1 G92S7 



AND RIGHT IN AMONG THOSE SHARKS WAS QUEEQUEG \ WHO OFTEN PUSHED THEM ASIDE 
WITH HIS FLOUNDERING FEET. 


| 


1 


/ 


\DtL 






































































THE WHITE WHALE 


297 


pooneer ; none of your apothecary’s medicine here ; you want to poison 
us, do ye? You have got out insurances on our lives and want to 
murder us all, and pocket the proceeds, do ye ?” 

“It was not me,” cried Dough-Boy, “it was Aunt Charity that 
brought the ginger on hoard; and bade me never give the harpoon- 
eers any spirits, but only this ginger-jub — so she called it.” 

“Ginger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with 
ye to the lockers, and get something better. I hope I do no wrong, 
Mr. Starbuck. It is the captain’s orders — grog for the harpooneer on 
a whale.” 

“Enough,” replied Starbuck, “only don’t hit him again, hut ” 

“Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or some- 
thing of that sort; and this fellow’s a weasel. What were you about 
saying, sir?” 

“Only this : go down with him and get what thou wantest thyself.” 
When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and 
a sort of tea-caddy in the other. The first contained strong spirits, 
and was handed to Queequeg; the second was Aunt Charity’s gift, 
and that was freely given to the waves. 


CHAP TEE LXXII 

STUBB AND FLASK KILL A RIGHT WHALE; AND THEN HAVE A 
TALK OVER HIM 

It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm Whale’s 
prodigious head hanging to the Pequod’s side. But we must let it 
continue hanging there awhile till we can get a chance to attend to it. 
For the present other matters press, and the best we can do now for 
the head, is to pray heaven the tackles may hold. 

Now, during the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had grad- 
ually drifted into a sea, which, by its occasional patches of yellow brit, 
gave unusual tokens of the vicinity of Bight Whales, a species of the 
Leviathan that but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking 
anvwhere near. And though all hands commonly disdained the cap- 
ture of those inferior creatures ; and though the Pequod was not com- 


298 


MOBY DICK; OR 

missioned to cruise for them at all, and though she had passed numbers 
of them near the Crozetts without lowering a boat; yet now that a 
Sperm Whale had been brought alongside and beheaded, to the sur- 
prise of all, the announcement was made that a Right Whale should be 
captured that day, if opportunity offered. 

Nor was this long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and 
two boats, Stubb’s and Flask’s, were detached in pursuit. Pulling 
farther and farther away, they at last became almost invisible to the men 
at the masthead. But suddenly in the distance, they saw a great heap 
of tumultuous white water, and soon after news came from aloft that 
one or both 'the boats must be fast. 

An interval passed and the boats were in plain sight, in the act of 
being dragged right towards the ship by the towing whale. So close 
did the monster come to the hull, that at first it seemed as if he 
meant it malice; but suddenly going down in a maelstrom, within 
three rods of the planks, he wholly disappeared from view, as if 
diving under the keel. “Cut, cut!” was the cry from the ship to 
the boats, which, for one instant, seemed on the point of being brought 
with a deadly dash against the vessel’s side. But having plenty of 
line yet in the tubs, and the whale not sounding very rapidly, they 
paid out abundance of rope, and at the same time pulled with all 
their might so as to get ahead of the ship. For a few minutes the 
struggle was intensely critical; for while they still slacked out the 
tightened line in one direction, and still plied their oars in another, 
the contending strain threatened to take them under. But it was 
only a few feet advance they sought to gain. And thjey stuck to it 
till they did gain it; when instantly, a swift tremor was felt run- 
ning like lightning along the keel, as the strained line, scraping be- 
neath the ship, suddenly rose to view under her bows, snapping and 
quivering; and so flinging off its drippings, that the drops fell like 
bits of broken glass on the water, while the whale beyond also rose to 
sight, and once more the boats were free to fly. But the fagged 
whale abated his speed, and blindly altering his course, went round 
the stem of the ship towing the two boats after him, so that they per- 
formed a complete circuit. 

Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close 


THE WHITE WHALE 


299 


flanking him on both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for 
lance; and thus round and round the Pequod the battle went, while 
the multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm 
Whale’s body, rushed to the fresh blood that was spilled, thirstily 
drinking at every new gash, as the eager Israelites did at the new 
bursting fountains that poured from smitten rock. 

At last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, 
he turned upon his hack a corpse. 

While the two headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his 
flukes, and in other ways getting the mass in readiness for towing, 
some conversation ensued between them. 

“I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard,” 
said Stubb, not without some disgust at the thought of having to do 
with so ignoble a leviathan. 

“Wants with it?” said Flask, coiling some spare line in the boat’s 
bow, “did you never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm 
Whale’s head hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same time 
a Right Whale’s on the larboard; did you ever hear, Stubb, that that 
ship can never afterwards capsize ?” 

“Why not ?” 

“I don’t know, hut I heard that gamboge ghost of a 
Fedallah saying so, and he seems to know all about ship’s 
charms. But I sometimes think he’ll charm the ship to no good 
at last. I don’t half like that chap, Stubb. Did you ever 
notice how that tusk of his is a sort of carved into a snake’s head, 
Stubb?” 

“Sink him ! I never look at him at all ; but if ever I get a chance 
of a dark night, and he standing hard by the bulwarks, and no one 
by; look down there, Flask” — pointing into the sea with a peculiar 
motion of both hands — “Aye, will I! Flask, I take that Fedallah 
to be the devil in disguise. Do you believe that cock-and-bull story 
about his having been stowed away on hoard ship? He’s the devil, 
I say. The reason why you don’t see his tail, is because he tucks it 
up out of sight; he carries it coiled away in his pocket, I guess. 
D — n him! now that I think of it, he’s always wanting oakum to 
stuff into the toes of his boots.” 


300 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“He sleeps in his boots, don’t he? He hasn’t got any hammock; 
but I’ve seen him lay of nights in a coil of rigging.” 

“Ho doubt, and it’s because of his cursed tail; he coils it down, 
do ye see, in the eye of the rigging.” 

“What’s the old man have so much to do with him for ?” 

“Striking up a swop or a bargain, I suppose.” 

“Bargain ? — about what ?” 

“Why, do ye see, the old man is hard bent after that White Whale, 
and the devil there is trying to come round him, and get him to swop 
away his silver watch, or his soul, or something of that sort, and then 
he’ll surrender Moby Dick.” 

“Pooh! Stubb, you are skylarking; how can Fedallah do that?” 

“I don’t know, Flask, but the devil is a curious chap, and a wicked 
one, I tell ye. Why, they say as how he went a sauntering into the 
old flagship once, switching his tail about devilish easy and gentle- 
manlike, and inquiring if the old governor was at home. Well, he 
was at home, and asked the devil what he wanted. The devil, switch- 
ing his hoofs, up and says, ‘I want John.’ ‘What for?’ says the old 
governor. ‘What business is that of yours?’ says the devil, getting 
mad, — ‘I want to use him.’ ‘Take him,’ says the governor — and by 
the Lord, Flask, if the devil didn’t give John the Asiatic cholera 
before he got through with him, I’ll eat this whale in one mouthful. 
But look sharp — ain’t you all ready there? Well, then, pull ahead, 
and let’s get the whale alongside.” 

“I think I remember some such story as you were telling,” said 
Flask, when at last the two boats were slowly advancing with their 
burden towards the ship ; “but I can’t remember where.” 

“Three Spaniards ! Adventures of those three bloody-minded 
soldadoes ? Did ye read it there, Flask ? I guess ye did.” 

“Ho; never saw such a book; heard of it, though. But now, tell 
me, Stubb, do you suppose that that devil you was speaking of just 
now, was the same you say is now on board the FequodV ’ 

•“Am I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn’t the 
devil live for ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did 
you ever see any parson wearing mourning for the devil? And if 
the devil has a latch-key to get into the admiral’s cabin, don’t you 


301 


THE WHITE WHALE 

suppose lie can crawl into a port-hole? Tell me that, Mr. Flask.” 

“How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb ?” 

“Do you see that mainmast there?” pointing to the ship; “well, 
that’s the figure one ; now take all the hoops in the Pequod’s hold, 
and string ’em along in a row with that mast, for oughts, do you 
see; well, that wouldn’t begin to be Fedallah’s age. Nor all the 
coopers in creation couldn’t show hoops enough to make oughts 
enough.” 

“But see here, Stubb, I thought you a little boasted just now, that 
you meant to give Fedallah a sea-toss, if you got a good chance. 
Now, if he’s so old as all those hoops of yours come to, and if he is 
going to live for ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard — 
tell me that ?” 

“Give him a good ducking, anyhow.” 

“But he’d crawl back.” 

“Duck him again; and keep ducking him.” 

“Suppose he should take it into his head to duck you, though — yes, 
and drown you — what then ?” 

“I should like to see him try it ; I’d give him such a pair of black 
eyes that he wouldn’t dare to show his face in the admiral’s cabin again 
for a long while, let alone down in the orlop there, where he lives, 
and hereabouts on the upper decks where he sneaks so much. Damn 
the devil, Flask; do you suppose I’m afraid of the devil? Who’s 
afraid of him, except the old governor who daren’t catch him and 
put him in double-darbies, as he deserves, but lets him go about kid- 
napping people; aye, and signed a bond with him, that all the people 
the devil kidnapped he’d roast for him. There’s a governor!” 

“Do you suppose Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab ?” 

“Do I suppose it? You’ll know it before long, Flask. But I am 
going now to keep a sharp lookout on him; and if I see anything 
very suspicious going on, I’ll just take him by the nape of his neck, 
and say — Look here, Beelzebub, you don’t do it; and if he makes any 
fuss, by the Lord, I’ll make a grab into his pocket for his tail, take 
it to the capstan, and give him such a wrenching and heaving, that 
his tail will come short off at the stump — do you see; and then, I 
rather guess when he finds himself docked in that queer fashion, 


302 MOBY DICK; OR 

he’ll sneak off without the poor satisfaction of feeling his tail be- 
tween his legs.” 

“And what will you do with the tail, Stubb?” 

“Do with it? Sell it for an ox whip when we get home; — what 
else?” 

“Now, do you mean what you say, and have been saying all along, 
Stubb ?” 

“Mean or not mean, here we are at the ship.” 

The boats were hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, 
where fluke-chains and other necessaries were already prepared for 
securing him. 

“Didn’t I tell you so?” said Flask; “yes, you’ll soon see this 
right whale’s head hoisted up opposite that parmacetti’s.” 

In good time, Flask’s saying proved true. As before, the Pequod 
steeply leaned over towards the sperm whale’s head, now, by the 
counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel ; though sorely 
strained, you may well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in 
Locke’s head, you go over that way ; but now, on the other side, hoist in 
Kant’s and you come back again ; but in very poor plight. Thus, some 
minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these 
thunderheads overboard, and then you will float light and right. 

In disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside 
the ship, the same preliminary proceedings commonly take place as 
in the case of a sperm whale; only, in the latter instance, the head 
is cut off whole, but in the former the lips and tongue are separately 
removed and hoisted on deck, with all the well-known black bone 
attached to what is called the crown-piece. But nothing like this, in 
the present case, had been done. The carcasses of both whales 
had dropped astern; and the head-laden ship not a little resembled 
a mule carrying a pair of overburdening panniers. 

Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale’s head, 
and ever and anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines 
in his own .hand. And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsee 
occupied his shadow; while, if the Parsee’s shadow was there at all 
it seemed only to blend with, and lengthen Ahab’s. As the crew 


THE WHITE WHALE 303 

toiled on, Laplandish speculations were bandied among them, concern- 
ing all these passing things. 


•CHAPTER LXXIII 

THE SPERM WHAXe’s HEAD CONTRASTED VIEW 

Here, now, are two great whales laying their heads together; let us 
join them, and lay together our own. 

Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the 
Right Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only 
whales regularly hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they present 
the two extremes of all the known varieties of the whale. As the ex- 
ternal difference between them is mainly observable in their heads; 
and as a head of each is this moment hanging from the Pequod's 
side; and as we may freely go from one to the other, by merely step- 
ping across the deck: — where, I should like to know, will you obtain 
a better chance to study practical cetology than here ? 

In the first place, you are struck by the general contrast between 
these heads. Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there 
is a certain mathematical symmetry in the Sperm Whale’s which the 
Right Whale’s sadly lacks. There is more character in the Sperm 
Whale’s head. As you behold it, you involuntarily yield the im- 
mense superiority to him, in point of pervading dignity. In the 
present instance, too, this dignity is heightened by the pepper and 
salt colour of his head at the summit, giving token of advance age 
and large experience. In short, he is what the fishermen technically 
call a “grey-headed whale.” 

Let us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads — namely, the 
two most important organs, the eye and the ear. Ear back on the side 
of the head, and low down, near the angle of either whale’s jaw, if 
you narrowly search, you will at least see a lashless eye, which you 
would fancy to be a young colt’s eye; so out of all proportion is it 
to the magnitude of the head. 

Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale’s eyes, it 


304 


MOBY DICK; OR 

is plain that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no 
more than he can one exactly astern. In a word, the position of the 
whale’s eyes corresponds to that of a man’s ears; and you may fancy 
for yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey 
objects through your ears. You would find that you could only com- 
mand some thirty degrees of vision in advance of the straight side- 
line of sight; and about thirty more behind it. If your bitterest foe 
were walking straight towards you, with dagger uplifted in broad day, 
you would not be able to see him, any more than if he were stealing 
upon you from behind. In a word, you would have two backs, so to 
speak ; but, at the same time also, two fronts (side-fronts) : for what 
is it that makes the front of a man — what, indeed, but his eyes ? 

Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the 
eyes are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so 
as to produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar po- 
sition of the whale’s eyes, effectually divided as they are by many 
cubic feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great moun- 
tain separating two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly 
separate the impressions which each independent organ imparts. The 
whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and an- 
other distinct picture on that side ; while all between must be profound 
darkness and nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to 
look out on the world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for 
his window. But with the whale, these two sashes are separately 
inserted, making two distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view. 
This peculiarity of the whale’s eyes is a thing always to be borne in 
mind in the fishery ; and to be remembered by the reader in some sub- 
sequent scenes. 

A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning 
this visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be con- 
tent with a hint. So long as a man’s eyes are open in the light, 
the act of seeing is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechan- 
ically seeing whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless, any 
one’s experience will teach him, that though he can take in an ^dis- 
criminating sweep of things at one glance, it is quite impossible for 
him, attentively, and completely, to examine any two things — however 


305 


THE WHITE WHALE 

large or however small — at one and the same instant of time; never 
mind if they lie side by side and touch each other. But if you now 
come to separate these two objects, and surround each by a circle of 
profound darkness ; then, in order to see one of them, in such a manner 
as to bring your mind to bear on it, the other will be utterly ex- 
cluded from your contemporary consciousness. How is it, then, with 
the whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously 
act; hut is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and 
subtle than man’s, that he can at the same moment of time at- 
tentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and 
the other in an exactly opposite direction ? If he can, then is it as 
marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to 
go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. 
Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison. 

It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that 
the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some 
whales when beset by three or four boats ; the timidity and liability to 
queer frights, so common to such whales ; I think that all this in- 
directly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which 
their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must in- 
volve them. 

But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If you are 
an entire stranger to their race, you might hunt over these two heads 
for hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no external 
leaf whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, 
so wondrously minute is it. It is lodged a little behind the eye. With 
respect to their ears, this important difference is to be observed 
between the sperm whale and the right. While the ear of the former 
has an external opening, that of the latter is entirely and evenly 
covered over with a membrane, so as to be quite imperceptible from 
without. 

Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the 
world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an 
ear which is smaller than a hare’s? But if his eyes were broad as 
the lens of Hershel’s great telescope; and his ears capacious as the 
porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or 


306 


MOBY DICK; OR 

sharper of hearing ? Not at all — Why then do you try to “enlarge” 
your mind ? Subtilise it. 

Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, 
cant over the sperm whale’s head, that it may lie bottom up ; then, as- 
cending by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth ; and 
were it not that the body is now completely separated from it, with a 
lantern we might descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of 
his stomach. But let us hold on here by this tooth, and look about us 
where we are. What a really beautiful and chaste-looking mouth! 
from floor to ceiling, lined, or rather papered with a glistening white 
membrane, glossy as bridal satins. 

But come out now, and look at this portentous lower jaw, which 
seems like the long narrow lid of an immense snuff-box, with the hinge 
at one end instead of one side. If you pry it up, so as to get it over- 
head, and expose its rows of teeth, it seems a terrific portcullis; and 
such alas! it proves to many a poor wight in the fishery, upon whom 
these spikes fall with impaling force. But far more terrible is it to 
behold, when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky whale, float- 
ing there suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, 
hanging straight down at right angles with his body, for all the world 
like a ship’s jibboom. This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; 
out of sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges 
of his jaw have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of 
plight, a reproach to all his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock- 
jaws upon him. 

In most cases this lower jaw — being easily unhinged by a practised 
artist — is disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of extract- 
ing the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that hard, white whale- 
bone with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles, in- 
cluding canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding-whips. 

With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were 
an anchor ; and when the proper time comes — some few days after the 
other work — Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished 
dentists, are set to drawing teeth. With a keen cutting-spade, Quee- 
queg lances the gums; then the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a 
tackle being rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth, as Michigan 


307 


THE WHITE WHALE 

oxen drag stumps of old oaks out of wild woodlands. There are gener- 
ally forty-two teeth in all ; in old whales, much worn down, but unde- 
cayed; nor filled after our artificial fashion. The jaw is afterwards 
sawn into slabs, and piled away like joists for building houses. 


CHAPTER LXXIV 

THE EIGHT WHALES’s HEAD CONTRASTED VIEW 

Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right 
Whale’s head. 

As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale’s head may he com- 
pared to a Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so 
broadly rounded) ; so, at a broad view, the Right Whale’s head bears 
a rather inelegant resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two 
hundred years ago an old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a 
shoemaker’s last. And in this same last or shoe, that old woman of 
the nursery tale, with the swarming brood, might very comfortably be 
lodged, she and all her progeny. 

But as you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume differ- 
ent aspects, according to your point of view. If you stand on its sum- 
mit and look at these two /-shaped spout-holes, you would take the whole 
head for an enormous bass-viol, and these spiracles, the apertures in 
its sounding-board. Then, again, if you fix your eye upon this strange, 
crested, comb-like incrustation on the top of the mass — this green, bar- 
nacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the “crown,” and the South- 
ern fishers the “bonnet” of the Right Whale ; fixing your eyes solely on 
this, you would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak, with a 
bird’s nest in its crotch. At any rate, when you watch those live crabs 
that nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost sure to occur 
to you ; unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the technical term 
“crown” also bestowed upon it; in which case you will take great in- 
terest in thinking how this mighty monster is actually a diademed king 
of the sea, whose green crown has been put together for him in this 
marvellous manner. But if this whale be a king, he is a very sulky- 
looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look at that hanging lower lip! 


308 


MOBY DICK; OR 

what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by carpenter’s 
measurements, about twenty feet long and five feet deep, a sulk and 
pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more. 

A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. 
The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an 
important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earth- 
quakes caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery 
threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word, were I at 
Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. 
Good Lord ! is this the road that Jonah went ? The roof is about twelve 
feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular 
ridgepole there ; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides present us with 
those wondrous, half-vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone, say 
three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the 
head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere 
been cursorily mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with 
hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in 
whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when open-mouthed he goes 
through the seas of brit in feeding-time. In the central blinds of bone, 
as they stand in their natural order, there are certain curious marks, 
curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the crea- 
ture’s age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though the cer- 
tainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savour 
of analogical probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant 
a far greater age to the Right Whale than at first glance will seem 
reasonable. 

In old times, there seems to have prevailed the most curious fancies 
concerning these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the won- 
drous “whiskers” inside of the whale’s mouth ; 1 another, “hogs’ 
bristles”; a third old gentleman in Hakluyt uses the following ele- 
gant language: “There are about two hundred and fifty fins grow- 
ing on each side of his upper chop, which reach over his tongue on 
each side of his mouth.” 

1 This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or 
rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the upper 
part of the outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes those tufts impart a 
rather brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn countenance. 


309 


THE WHITE WHALE 

As every one knows, these same “hogs’ bristles,” “fins,” “whiskers,” 
“blinds,” or whatever you please, furnish to the ladies their busks and 
other stiffening contrivances. But in this particular, the demand 
has long been on the decline. It was in Queen Anne’s time that the 
bone was in its glory, the farthingale being then all the fashion. And 
as those ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of the 
whale, as you may say ; even so, in a shower, with the like thoughtless- 
ness, do we nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the 
umbrella being a tent spread over the same bone. 

But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, 
standing in the Bight Whale’s mouth, look around you afresh. See- 
ing all these colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would 
you not think you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing 
upon its thousands pipes ? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of 
the softest Turkey — the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor 
of the mouth. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in 
hoisting it on deck. This particular tongue now before us; at a 
passing glance I should say it was a six-barreler ; that is, it will yield 
you about that amount of oil. 

Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started 
with — that the Sperm Whale and the Bight Whale have almost en- 
tirely different heads. To sum up, then: in the Bight Whale’s there 
is no great well of sperm ; no ivory teeth at all ; no long, slender man- 
dible of a lower jaw, like the Sperm Whale’s. Hor in the Sperm 
Whale are there any of those blinds of hone ; no huge lower lip ; and 
scarcely anything of a tongue. Again the Bight Whale has two ex- 
ternal spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one. 

Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they 
yet lie together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the 
other will not be very long in following. 

Can you catch the expression of Sperm Whale’s there? It is the 
same he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead 
seem now faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie- 
like placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death. But 
mark the other head’s expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed 
by accident against the vessel’s side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. 


310 


MOBY DICK; OR 

Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormus practical 
resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been 
a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up 
Spinoza in his latter years. 


CHAPTER LXXV 

THE BATTERING-RAM 

Ere quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm Whale’s head, I would have 
you — as a sensible physiologist, simply — particularly remark its front 
aspect, in all its compacted collectedness. I would have you in- 
vestigate it now with the sole view of forming to yourself some un- 
exaggerated, intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power 
may be lodged there. Here is a vital point; for you must either 
satisfactorily settle this matter with yourself, or for ever remain 
an infidel as to one of the most appalling, but not the less true events, 
perhaps anywhere to be found in all recorded history. 

You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm 
Whale, the front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane 
to the water; you observe that the lower part of that front slopes 
considerably backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the 
long socket which receives the boon>like lower jaw; you observe 
that the mouth is entirely under the head, much in the same way, 
indeed, as though your own mouth were entirely under your chin. 
Moreover, you observe that the whale has no external nose; and that 
what nose he has — his spout-hole — is on the top of his head; you ob- 
serve that his eyes and ears are at the side of his head, nearly one- 
third of his entire length from the front. Wherefore, you must now 
have perceived that the front of the Sperm Wh'ale’s head is a dead, 
blind wall without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort 
whatsoever. Furthermore, you are now to consider that only in the 
extreme, lower, backward sloping part of the front of the head is 
there the slightest vestige of bone; and not till you get near twenty 
feet from the forehead do you come to the full cranial development. 
So that this whole enormous boneless mass is as one wad. Finally, 


311 


THE WHITE WHALE 

though, as will soon he revealed, its contents partly comprise the most 
delicate oil; yet, you are now to be appraised of the nature of the 
substance which so impregnably invests all that apparent effeminacy. 
In some previous place I have described to you how the blubber 
wraps the body of the whale, as the rind wraps an orange. Just so 
with the head ; but with this difference : about the head this envelope, 
though not so thick, is of a boneless toughness, inestimable by any man 
who has not handled it. The severest pointed harpoon, the sharpest 
lance darted by the strongest human arm, impotently rebounds from 
it. It is as though the forehead of the Sperm Whale were paved with 
horses’ hoofs. I do not think that any sensation lurks in it. 

Bethink yourself also of another thing. When two large, loaded 
Indiamen chance to crowd and crush towards each other in the docks, 
what do the sailors do ? They do not suspend between them, at the 
point of coming contact, any merely hard substance, like iron or wood. 

No, they hold there a large, round wad of tow and cork, enveloped 
in the thickest and toughest of ox-hide. That bravely and uninjured 
takes the jam which would have snapped all their oaken handspikes 
and iron crowbars. By itself this sufficiently illustrates the obvious 
fact I drive at. But supplementary to this, it has hypothetically 
occurred to me, that as ordinary fish possess what is called a swimming 
bladder in them, capable, at will, of distension or contraction ; and as 
the Sperm Whale, as far as I know, has no such provision in him; 
considering, too, the otherwise inexplicable manner in which he now 
depresses his head altogether beneath the surface, and anon swims 
with it high elevated out of the water; considering the unobstructed 
elasticity of its envelope ; considering the unique interior of his head ; 
it has hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those mystical lung- 
celled honeycombs there may possibly have some hitherto unknown 
and unsuspected connection with the outer air, so as to be suscep- 
tible to atmospheric distention and contraction. If this be so, fancy 
the irresistibleness of that might, to which the most impalpable and 
destructive of all elements contributes. 

Now, mark. Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, unin- 
jurable wall, and this most buoyant thing within ; there swims behind 
it all a mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately estimated as 


312 


MOBY DICK; OR 

piled wood is — by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as tbe 
smallest insect. So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the 
specialties and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this 
expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more incon- 
siderable braining feats; I trust you will have renounced all ignorant 
incredulity, and be ready to abide by this ; that though the Sperm 
Whale stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the 
Atlantic with the Pacific, you would not elevate one hair of your 
eyebrow. For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and 
sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander 
giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the provincials 
then? What befell the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess’s 
veil at Lais? 


CHAPTER LXXVI 

THE GREAT HEIDELBURGH TUN 

How comes the Baling of the Case. But to comprehend it aright, 
you must know something of the curious internal structure of the 
thing operated upon. 

Regarding the Sperm Whale’s head as a solid oblong, you may on 
an inclined plane sideways divide it into two quoins , 1 whereof the 
lower is the bony structure, forming the cranium and jaws, and the 
upper an unctuous mass wholly free from bones: its broad forward 
end forming the expanded vertical apparent forehead of the whale. 
At the middle of the forehead horizontally subdivide this upper 
quoin, and then you have two almost equal parts, which before were 
naturally divided by an internal wall of a thick tendinous substance. 

The lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honey- 
comb of oil, formed by the crossing and re-crossing, into ten thousand 
infiltrated cells, of tough elastic white fibres throughout its whole 
extent. The upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded as the 

1 Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical mathe- 
matics. I know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a solid 
which differs from a wedge in having its sharp end formed by the steep 
inclination of one side, instead of the mutual tapering of both sides. 


THE WHITE WHALE 313 

great Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale. And as that famous 
great tierce is mystically carved in front, so the whale’s vast plaited 
forehead forms innumerable strange devices for the emblematical 
adornment of his wondrous tun. Moreover, as that of Hiedelhurgh 
was always replenished with the most excellent of the wines of the 
Rhenish valleys, so the tun of the whale contains by far the most 
precious of all his oily vintages ; namely, the highly prized spermaceti, 
in its absolutely pure, limpid, and odoriferous state. Nor is this 
precious substance found unalloyed in any other part of the creature. 
Though in life it remains perfectly fluid, yet, upon exposure to the 
air, after death, it soon begins to concrete; sending forth beautiful 
crystalline shoots, as when the first thin delicate ice is just forming 
in water. A large whale’s case generally yields about five hundred 
gallons of sperm, though from unavoidable circumstances, considerable 
of it is spilled, leaks, and dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably 
lost in the ticklish business of securing what you can. 

I know not with what fine and costly material the Heidelburgh 
Tun was coated within, but in superlative richness that coating could 
not possibly have compared with the silken pearl coloured membrane, 
like the lining of a fine pelisse, forming the inner surface of the 
Sperm Whale’s case. 

It will have been seen that the Heidelhurg Tun of the Sperm 
Whale embraces the entire length of the entire top of the head; 
and since — as has been elsewhere set forth — the head embraces one- 
third of the whole length of the creature, then setting that length 
down at eighty feet for a good-sized whale, you have more than twenty- 
six feet for the depth of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up and 
down against a ship’s side. 

As in decapitating the whale, the operator’s instrument is brought 
close to the spot where an entrance is subsequently forced into the 
spermaceti magazine; he has therefore to he uncommonly heedful, 
lest a careless, untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wast- 
ingly let out its invaluable contents. It is this decapitated end of 
the head, also, which is at last elevated out of the water, and retained 
in that position by the enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen com- 
binations on one side make quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter. 


314 


MOBY DICK; OR 

Thus much being said, attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous 
and — in this particular instance — almost fatal operation whereby the 
Sperm Whale’s great Heidelburgh Tun is tapped. 


CHAPTER LXXYII 

CISTERN AND BUCKETS 

Ximble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his 
erect posture, runs straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm, 
to the part where it exactly projects over the hoisted tun. He has 
carried with him a light tackle called a whip, consisting of only two 
parts, travelling through a single sheaved block. Securing this block, 
so that it hangs down from the yardarm, he swings one end of the 
rope, till it is caught and firmly held by a hand on deck. Then, 
hand over hand, down the other part, the Indian drops through the 
air, till dexterously he lands on the summit of the head. There — still 
high elevated above the rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously 
cries — he seems some Turkish Muezzin calling the good people to 
prayers from the top of a tower. A short-handled sharp spade being 
sent up to him, he diligently searches for the proper place to begin 
breaking into the tun. In this business he proceeds very heedfully, 
like a treasure-hunter in some old house, sounding the walls to find 
where the gold is masoned in. By the time this * cautious search is 
over, a stout iron-bound bucket, precisely like a well-bucket, has been 
attached to one end of the whip : while the other end, being stretched 
across the deck, is there held by two or three alert hands. These last 
now hoist the bucket within grasp of the Indian, to whom another 
person has reached up a very long pole. Inserting this pole into the 
bucket, Tashtego downward guides the bucket into the tun, till it en- 
tirely disappears; then giving the word to the seamen at the whip, 
up comes the bucket again, all bubbling like a dairymaid’s pail of 
new milk. Carefully lowered from its height, the full-freighted 
vessel is caught by an appointed hand, and quickly emptied into a 
large tub. Then re-mounting aloft, it again goes through the same 
round until the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the end, 


315 


THE WHITE WHALE 

Tashtego has to ram his long pole harder and harder, and deeper and 
deeper into the tun, until some twenty feet of the pole have gone 
down. 

Now, the people of the Pequod had been haling some time in this 
way ; several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm ; when all 
at once a queer accident happened. Whether it was that Tashtego 
that wild Indian, was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a mo- 
ment his one-handed hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the 
head; or whether the place where he stood was so treacherous and 
cozy; or whether the Evil One himself would have it to fall out so, 
without stating his particular reason; how it was exactly, there is no 
telling now; but, on a sudden, as the eightieth or ninetieth bucket 
came suckingly up — my God! poor Tashtego — like the twin recipro- 
cating bucket in a veritable well, dropped head foremost down into this 
great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with a horrible oily gurgling went 
clean out of sight ! 

“Man overboard !” cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation 
first came to his senses. “Swing the bucket this way !” and putting 
one foot into it, so as the better to secure his slippery hand-hold on 
the whip itself, the hoisters ran him high up to the top of the head, 
almost before Tashtego could have reached its interior bottom. 
Meantime, there was a terrible tumult. Looking over the side, they 
saw the before lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the 
surface of the sea, as if that moment seized with some momentous 
idea; whereas it was only the poor Indian unconsciously revealing 
by those struggles the perilous depth to which he had sunk. 

At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was clear- 
ing the whip — which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles 
— a sharp, cracking noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horror 
of all, one of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, 
and with a vast vibration the enormous mass sideways swung, till the 
drunk ship reeled and shook as if smitten by an iceberg. The one 
remaining hook, upon which the entire strain now depended, seemed 
every instant to be on the point of giving way; an event still more 
likely from the violent motions of the head. 

“Come down, come down!” yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with 


316 


MOBY DICK; OR 

one hand holding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should 
drop, he would still remain suspended; the negro having cleared the 
foul line, rammed down the bucket into the now collapsed well, mean- 
ing that the buried harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted 
out. 

“In heaven’s name, man,” cried Stubb, “are you ramming home a 
cartridge there ? — Avast ! How will that help him ; j amming that 
iron-bound bucket on top of his head ? Avast, will ye !” 

“Stand clear of the tackle!” cried a voice like the bursting of a 
rocket. 

Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous 
mass dropped into the sea, like Niagara’s Table Rock into the whirl- 
pool ; the suddenly relieved hull rolled away from- it, to far down her 
glittering copper; and all caught their breath, as half-swinging — now 
over the sailor’s heads, and now over the water — Daggoo, through a 
thick mist of spray, was dimly beheld clinging to the pendulous 
tackles, while poor, buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down 
to the bottom of the sea ! But hardly had the blinding vapour cleared 
away, when a naked figure with a boarding-sword in its hand, was for 
one swift moment seen hovering over the bulwarks. The next, a 
loud splash announced that my brave Queequeg had dived to the 
rescue. One packed rush was made to the side, and every eye counted 
every ripple, as moment followed moment, and no sign of either the 
sinker or the diver could be seen. Some hands now jumped into a 
boat alongside, and pushed a little off from the ship. 

“Ha ! ha !” cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet, swinging 
perch overhead; and looking farther off from the side, we saw an 
arm thrust upright from the blue waves ; a sight strange to see, as an 
arm thrust forth from the grass over a grave. 

“Both! both! — it is both!” — cried Daggoo again with a joyful 
shout; and soon after, Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with 
one hand, and with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian. 
Drawn into the waiting boat, they were quickly brought to the deck; 
but Tashtego was long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very 
brisk. 

Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving 


THE WHITE WHALE 


317 


after the slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had 
made side lunges near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; 
then, dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and 
upwards, and so hauled out our poor Tash by the head. He averred,, 
that upon first thrusting in for him, a leg was presented; but well 
knowing that that was not as it ought to be, and might occasion great 
trouble ; — he had thrust back the leg, and by a dexterous heave and toss, 
had wrought a somerset upon the Indian ; so that with the next trial, he 
came forth in the good old way — head foremost. As for the great head 
itself, that was doing as well as could be expected. 

And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Quee- 
queg, the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully 
accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently 
hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten. 

I know that this queer adventure of the Gay-Header’s will be sure 
to seem incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may 
have either seen or heard of some one’s falling into a cistern ashore; 
an accident which not seldom happens, and with much less reason too 
than the Indian’s, considering the exceeding slipperiness of the curb 
of the Sperm Whale’s well. 

But, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this ? We 
thought the tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale, was the 
lightest and most corky part about him; and yet thou makest it sink 
in an element of a far greater specific gravity than itself. We have 
thee there. Hot at all, but I have ye; for at the time poor Tash fell 
in, the case had been nearly emptied of its lighter contents, leaving 
little but the dense tendinous wall of the well — a double-welded, ham- 
mered substance, as I have before said, much heavier than the sea 
water, and a lump of which sinks in it like lead almost. But the 
tendency to rapid sinking in this substance was in the present instance 
materially counteracted by the other parts of the head remaining un- 
detached from it, so that it sank very slowly and deliberately indeed, 
affording Queequeg a fair chance for performing his agile dexterities 
on the run, as you may say. 

How, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very 
precious perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of 


sis MOBY DICK; OR 

fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner 
chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end 
can readily be recalled — the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, 
who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceed- 
ing store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he 
died embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s 
honey head, and sweetly perished there ? 


CHAPTER LXXVIII 

THE PRAIRIE 

To scan the lines of his face, or feel the bumps on the head of this 
Leviathan; this is a thing which no physiognomist or phrenologist 
has as yet undertaken. Such an enterprise would seem almost as hope- 
ful as for Lavater to have scrutinised the wrinkles on the Rock of 
Gibraltar, or for Gall to have mounted a ladder and manipulated the 
Dome of the Pantheon. Still, in that famous work of his, Lavater 
not only treats of the various faces of men, but also attentively studies 
the faces of horses, birds, serpents, and fish ; and dwells in detail upon 
the modifications of expression discernible therein. Hor have Gall 
and his disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching 
the phrenological characteristics of other beings than man. Therefore, 
though I am but ill qualified for a pioneer, in the application of 
these two semi-sciences to the whale, I will do my endeavour. I 
try all things; I achieve what I can. 

Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous 
creature. He has no proper nose. And since the nose is the central 
and most conspicuous of the features ; and since it perhaps most mod- 
ifies and finally controls their combined expression; hence it would 
seem that its entire absence, as an external appendage, must very 
largely affect the countenance of the whale. For as in landscape gar- 
dening, a spire, cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed 
almost indispensable to the completion of the scene; so no face can be 
physiognomically in keeping without the elevated open-work belfry of 


THE WHITE WHALE 319 

the nose. Dash the nose from Phidias’s marble Jove, and what a 
sorry remainder ! Nevertheless, Leviathan is of so mighty a magni- 
tude, all his proportions are so stately, that the same deficiency which 
in the sculptured Jove was hideous, in him is no blemish at all. Nay, 
it is an added grandeur. A nose to the whale would have been im- 
pertinent. As on your .physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast 
head in your jolly-boat, your noble conceptions of him are never in- 
sulted by the reflection that he has a nose to he pulled. A pestilent 
conceit, which so often will insist upon obtruding even when behold- 
ing the mightiest royalty on his throne. 

In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical 
view to he had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his 
head. This aspect is sublime. 

In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with 
the morning. In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of the hull 
has a touch of the grand in it. Pushing heavy cannon up mountain 
defiles, the elephant’s brow is majestic. Human or animal, the mys- 
tical brow is as that great golden seal affixed by the German emperors 
to their decrees. It signifies — “God: done this day by my hand.” 
But in most creatures, nay, in man himself, very often the brow is 
but a mere strip of alpine land lying along the snow line. Few are 
the foreheads which like Shakespeare’s or Melanchthon’s rise so high, 
and descend so low, that the eyes themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless 
mountain lakes; and all above them in the forehead’s wrinkles, you 
seem to track the antlered thoughts descending there to drink, as the 
Highland hunters track the snow prints of the deer. But in the great 
Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the 
brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front 
view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in 
beholding any other object in living nature. For you see no one 
point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, 
ears,, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one 
broad firmament of a forehead, plaited with riddles; dumbly lowering 
with the doom of boats, and ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does 
this wondrous brow diminish; though that way viewed, its grandeur 


320 MOBY DICK; OR 

does not domineer upon you so. In profile, you plainly perceive that 
horizontal, semi-crescentic depression in the forehead’s middle, which, 
in man, is Lavater’s mark of genius. 

But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale 
ever written a book, spoken a speech ? No, his great genius is declared 
in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared ki 
his pyramidical silence* And this reminds me that had the great 
Sperm Whale been known to the yoMng Orient World, he would have 
been deified by their childmagian thoughts. They deified the croc- 
odile of the Nile, because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm 
Whale has no tongue, or at least it is so exceedingly small, as to be 
incapable of protrusion. If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical 
nation shall lure back to their birthright, the merry May-day gods 
of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; 
in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, 
the great Sperm Whale shall lord it. 

Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But 
there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s 
and every being’s face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, 
is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty 
languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder 
and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read 
the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow 
before you. Bead if you can. 


CHAP TEE LXXIX 

THE NUT 

If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenolo- 
gist his brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to 
.square. 

In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty 
feet in length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull 
is as the side view of a moderately inclined plane resting throughout 
on a level base. But in life — as we have elsewhere seen — this inclined 


THE WHITE WHALE B2i 

plane is angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous 
superincumbent mass of the junk and sperm. At the high end the 
skull forms a crater to bed that part of the mass; while under the 
long floor of this crater — in another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches 
in length and as many in depth — reposes the mere handful of this 
monster’s brain. The brain is at least twenty feet from his apparent 
forehead in life; it is hidden away behind its vast outworks, like the 
innermost citadel within the amplified fortifications of Quebec. 
So like a choice casket is it secreted in him, that I have known some 
whalemen who peremptorily deny that the Sperm Whale has any other 
brain than that palpable semblance of one formed by the cubic yards 
of his sperm magazine. Lying in strange folds, courses, and con- 
volutions, to their apprehensions, it seems more in keeping with 
the idea of his general might to regard that mystic part of him as the 
seat of his intelligence. 

It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, 
in the creature’s living intact state, is an entire delusion. As for 
his true brain, you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any. 
The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the 
common world. 

If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear 
view of its rear end, which is the high end, you will be struck by its 
resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same situation, and 
from the same point of view. Indeed, place this reversed skull 
(scale down to the human magnitude) among a plate of men’s skulls, 
and you would involuntarily confound it with them; and remarking 
the depressions on one part of its summit, in phrenological phrase 
you would say — This man had no self-esteem, and no veneration. 
And by those negations, considered along with the affirmative fact 
of his prodigious bulk and power, you can best form to yourself 
the truest, though not the most exhilarating conception of what the 
most exalted potency is. 

But if from the comparative dimensions of the whale’s proper 
brain, you deem it incapable of being adequately charted, then I have 
another idea for you. If you attentively regard almost any quad- 
ruped’s spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae 


322 


MOBY DICK; OR 

to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental re- 
semblance to the skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the 
vertebrae are absolutely undeveloped skulls. But the curious ex- 
ternal resemblance, I take it the Germans were not the first men to per- 
ceive. A foreign friend once pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of 
a foe he had slain, and with the vertebrae of which he was inlaying, 
in a sort of basso-relievo, the beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I 
consider that the phrenologists have omitted an important thing in not 
pushing their investigations from the cerebellum through the spinal 
canal; for I believe that much of a man’s character will be found 
betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your 
skull, whoever’ you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a 
full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious 
staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world. 

Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His 
cranial cavity is continuous with the first neck vertebra; and in that 
vertebra the bottom of the spinal canal will measure ten inches 
across, being eight in height, and of a triangular figure with the 
base downwards. As it passes through the remaining vertebrae the 
canal tapers in size, but for a considerable distance remains of large 
capacity. Now, of course, this canal is filled with much the same 
strangely fibrous substance — the spinal cord — as the brain ; and directly 
communicates with the brain. And what is still more, for many 
feet after emerging from the brain’s cavity, the spinal cord remains 
of an undecreasing girth, almost equal to that of the brain. Under 
all these circumstances, would it be unreasonable to survey and map 
out the whale’s spine phrenologically ? For, viewed in this light, 
the wonderful comparative smallness of his brain proper is more than 
compensated by the wonderful comparative magnitude of his spinal 
cord. 

But leaving this hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, 
I would merely assume the spinal theory for a moment, in referenec to 
the Sperm Whale’s hump. This august hump, if I mistake not, rises 
over one of the larger vertebras, and is, therefore, in some sort, the 
outer convex mould of it. From its relative situation then, I should 
call this high hump the organ of firmness or indomitableness in the 


THE WHITE WHALE 323 

Sperm Whale. And that the great monster is indomitable, you will 
yet have reason to know. 


CHAPTEK LXXX 

THE PEQUOD MEETS THE VIRGIH 

The pedestinated day arrived, and we duly met the ship Jungfrau , 
Derick de Deer, master, of Bremen. 

At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch 
and Germans are now among the least ; but here and there at very wide 
intervals of latitude and longitude, you still occasionally meet with 
their flag in the Pacific, 

For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her 
respects. While yet some distance from the Pequod , she rounded 
to, and dropping a boat, her captain was impelled towards us, im- 
patiently standing in the bows instead of the stern. 

“What has he in his hand there V ’ cried Starbuck, pointing to some- 
thing wavingly held by the German. “Impossible! — a lamp-feeder!” 

“Not that,” said Stubb, “no, no, it’s a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; 
he’s coming off to make us our coffee, is the Yarman; don’t you see 
that big tin can there alongside of him? — that’s his boiling water. 
Oh ! he’s all right, is the Yarman.” 

“Go along with you,” cried Flask. “It’s a lamp-feeder and an oil- 
can. He’s out of oil, and has come a-beggin.” 

However curious it may seem for an oil-ship to be borrowing oil 
on the whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly contradict 
the old proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes 
•such a thing really happens; and in the present case Captain Derick 
de Deer did indubitably conduct a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare. 

As he mounted the deck, Ahab abruptly accosted him, without at 
all heeding what he had in his hand; but in his broken lingo the 
German soon envinced his complete ignorance of the White Whale; 
immediately turning the conversation to his lamp-feeder and oilcan, 
with some remarks touching his having to turn into his hammock at 
night in profound darkness — his last drop of Bremen oil being gone, 


324 


MOBY DICK; OR 

and not a single flying-fish vet captured to supply the deficiency ; con- 
cluding by hinting that his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is 
technically called a clean one (that is, an empty one), well deserving 
the name of Jungfrau or the Virgin. 

His necessities supplied, Derick departed ; but he had not gained 
his ship’s side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from 
the mastheads of both vessels ; and so eager for the chase was Derick, 
that without pausing to put his oilcan and lamp-feeder aboard, he 
slewed round his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders. 

How, the game having risen to leeward, he and the other three 
German boats that soon followed him, had considerably the start 
of the Pequod’s keels. There were eight whales, an average pod. 
Aware of their danger, they were going all abreast with great speed 
straight before the wind, rubbing their flanks as closely as so many 
spans of horses in harness. They left a great, wide wake, as though con- 
tinually unrolling a great wide parchment upon the sea. 

Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a 
huge, humped old bull,, which by his comparatively slow progress, as 
well as by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed 
afflicted with the jaundice, or some other infirmity. Whether this whale 
belonged to the pod in advance, seemed questionable; for it .is not 
customary for such venerable leviathans to be at all social, never- 
theless, he stuck to their wake, though indeed their back water must 
have retarded him, because the white-bone or swell at his broad 
muzzle was a dashed one, like the swell formed when two hostile 
currents meet. His spout was short, slow, and laborious; coming 
forth with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself in torn 
shreds, followed by strange subterranean commotions in him, which 
seemed to have egress at his other buried extremity, * causing the 
waters behind him to upbubble. 

“Who’s got some paregoric?” said Stubb; “he has the stomach- 
ache, I’m afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach- 
ache. Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It’s 
the first foul wind I ever knew to blow from astern; but look, did 
ever whale yaw so before ? it must be, he’s lost his tiller.” 

As an overladen Indianman bearing down the Hindostan coast with 


THE WHITE WHALE 325 

a deck load of frightened horses, careens* buries, rolls, and wallows 
on her way ; so did this old whale heave his aged bulk, and now and 
then partly turning over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose the cause 
of his devious wake in the unnatural stump of his starboard fin. 
Whether he had lost that fin in battle, or had been born without it, 
it were hard to say. 

“Only wait a bit, old chap, and I’ll give ye a sling for that wounded 
arm,” cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near him. 

“Mind he don’t sling thee with it,” cried Starbuck. “Give way, 
or the German will have him.” 

With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for 
this one fish, because not only was he the largest, and therefore the 
most valuable whale, but he was nearest to them, and the other 
whales were going with such great velocity, moreover, as almost to defy 
pursuit for the time. At this juncture the Pequod’s keels had shot 
by the three German boats last lowered ; but from the great start he had 
had, Derick’s boat still led the chase, though every moment neared by 
his foreign rivals. The only thing they feared, was, that from being 
already so nigh- to his mark, he would be enabled to dart his iron 
before they could completely overtake and pass him. As for Derick, 
he seemed quite confident that this would be the case, and occasionally 
with a deriding gesture shook his lamp-feeder at the other boats. 

“The ungracious and ungrateful dog!” cried Starbuck; “he mocks 
and dares me with the very poor-box I filled for him not five minutes 
ago!” — then in his old intense whisper — “Give way, greyhounds! 
Dog to it !” 

“I tell ye what it is, men,” — cried Stubb to his crew — “it’s against 
my religion to get mad; but I’d like to eat that villainous Yarman — 
pull — won’t ye? Are ye going to let that rascal beat ye? Do ye 
love brandy? A hogshead of brandy, then, to the best man. Come, 
why don’t some of ye burst a blood-vessel? Who’s that been drop- 
ping an* anchor overboard — we don’t budge an inch — we’re becalmed. 
Halloa, here’s grass growing in the boat’s bottom — and by the Lord, 
the mast there’s budding. This won’t do, boys. Look at that Yar- 
man ! The short and long of it is, men, will ye spit fire or not ?” 

<‘Oh ! see the suds he makes !” pried Fl^sk, dancing up and down; — 


326 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“What a hump — oh, do pile on the beef — lays like a log! Oh! my 
lads, do spring — slap-jacks and quohogs for supper, you know, my 
lads — baked clams and muffins — oh, do, do, spring — he’s a hundred 
barreller — don’t lose him now — don’t, oh, don't! — see that Yarman — 
oh! won’t ye pull for your duff, my lads — such a sog! such a sogger! 
Don’t ye love sperm? There goes three thousand dollars, men! — 
a bank ! — a whole bank ! The Bank of England ! — Oh, do, do, do ! — 
What’s that Yarman about now?” 

At this moment Derick was in the act of pitching his lamp-feeder 
at the advancing boats, and also his oilcan; perhaps with the double 
view of retarding his rival’s way, and at the same time economically 
accelerating his own by the momentary impetus of the backward 
toss. 

“The unmannerly Dutch dogger!” cried Stubb. “Pull now, men, 
like fifty thousand line-of-battleship loads of red-haired devils. What 
d’ye say, Tashtego; are you the man to snap your spine in two-and- 
twenty pieces for the honour of old Gay-Head ? What d’ye say ?” 

“I say, pull like god-dam,” — cried the Indian. 

Eiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of the German, the 
Pequod's three boats now began ranging almost abreast ; and, so 
disposed, momentarily neared him. In that fine, loose, chivalrous 
attitude of the headsman when drawing near to his prey, the three 
mates stood up proudly, occasionally backing the after oarsman with 
an exhilarating cry of, “There she slides, now ! Hurrah for the white- 
ash breeze! Down with the Yarman ! Sail over him !” 

But so decided an original start had Derick had, that spite of all 
their gallantry, he would have proved the victor in this race, had 
not a righteous judgment descended upon him in a crab which caught 
the blade of his midship oarsman. While this clumsy lubber was 
striving to free his white-ash, and while, in consequence, Derick’s 
boat was nigh to capsizing, and he thundering away at his men in a 
mighty rage; — that was a good time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. 
With a shout, they took a mortal start forwards, and slantingly 
ranged up on the German’s quarter. An instant more, and all four 
boats were diagonally in the whale’s immediate wake, while stretch- 
ing from them, on both sides, was the foaming swell that he made. 


327 


THE WHITE WHALE 

It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale 
was now going head out, and sending his spout before him in a con- 
tinual tormented jet ; while his one poor fin beat his side in an 
agony of fright. Now to this hand, now to that, he yawled in his: 
faltering flight, and still at every billow that he broke he spasmod- 
ically sank in the sea, or sideways rolled towards the sky his one 
beating fin. So have I seen a bird with clipped wing making 
affrighted broken circles in the air, vainly striving to escape the piratical 
hawks. But the bird has a voice, and with plaintive cries will make 
known her fear; but the fear of this vast dumb brute of the sea was 
chained up and enchanted in him ; he had no voice, save that chok- 
ing respiration through his spiracle, and this made the sight of him 
unspeakably pitiable; while still, in his amazing bulk, portcullis 
jaw, and omnipotent tail, there was enough to appal the stoutest man 
who so pitied. 

Seeing now that but a very few moments more would give the 
Pequod’s boats the advantage, and rather than be thus foiled of his 
game, Derick chose to hazard what to him -must have seemed a most 
unusually long dart, ere the last chance would for ever escape. 

But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all 
three tigers — Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo — instinctively sprang to their 
feet, and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their 
barbs ; and darted over the head of the German harpooneer, their three 
Nantucket irons entered the whale. Blinding vapours of foam and 
white fire! The three boats, in the first fury of the whale’s head- 
long rush, bumped the German’s aside with such force, that both 
Derick and his baffled harpooneer spilled out, and sailed over by the 
three flying keels. 

“Don’t be afraid, my butter-boxes,” cried Stubb, casting a passing 
glance upon them as he shot by; “ye’ll be picked up presently — all 
right — I saw some sharks astern — St. Bernard’s dogs, you know — 
relieve distressed travellers. Hurrah! this is the way to sail now. 
Every keel a sunbeam! Hurrah! — Here we go like three tin kettles 
at the tail of a mad cougar! This puts me in mind of fastening to 
an elephant in a tilbury on a plain — makes the wheelspokes fly, boys, 
when you fasten to him that way; and there’s danger of being pitched 


328 


MOBY DICK; OR 

out too, when you strike a hill. Hurrah ! this is the way a fellow 
feels when he’s going to Davy Jones — all a rush down an endless in- 
clined plane! Hurrah! this whale carries the everlasting mail!” 

But the monster’s run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, 
he tumultuously sounded. With a grating rush, the three lines flew 
round the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in 
them; while so fearful were the harpooneers that this rapid sound- 
ing would soon exhaust the lines, that using all their dexterous might, 
they caught repeated smoking turns with the rope to hold on; till 
at last — owing to the perpendicular strain from the head-line chocks 
of the boats, whence the three ropes went straight down into the 
blue — the gunwales of the bows were almost even with the water, 
while the three sterns tilted high in the air. And the whale soon ceasing 
to sound, for some time they remained in that attitude, fearful of 
expending more line, though the position was a little ticklish. But 
though boats have been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this 
“holding-on,” as it is called; this hooking up by the keen barbs of 
his live flesh from the back; this it is that often torments the Levia- 
than into soon rising again to meet the sharp lance of his foes. 
Yet not to speak of the peril of the thing, it is to be doubted whether 
this course is always the best ; for it is but reasonable to presume, 
that the longer the stricken whale stays under water, the more he is 
exhausted; because, owing to the enormous surface of him — in a 
full-grown sperm whale something less than 2000 square feet — the 
pressure of the water is immense. We all know what an astonishing 
atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even here, above 
ground, in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale, bearing on 
his back a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean ! It must at least 
equal the weight of fifty atmospheres. One whaleman has estimated 
it at the rate of twenty line-of-battleships, with all their guns, and 
stores, and men on board. 

As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down 
into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any 
sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its 
depths; what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that 
silence and placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing 


329 


THE WHITE WHALE 

and wrenching in agony ! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were 
visible at the hows. Seems it credible that by three such thin threads 
the great Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight- 
day clock ? Suspended ? and to what ? To three bits of boards. Is this 
the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said — “Canst thou 
fill his skin with barbed irons ? or his head with fish-spears ? The 
sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, 
nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot 
make him flee, darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shak- 
ing of a spear !” This the creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfil- 
ments should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a 
thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan has run his head under the 
mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod’s fish-spears ! 

In that sloping afternoon sunlight,, the shadows that the three boats 
sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and 
broad enough to shade half Xerxes’ army. Who can tell how ap- 
palling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms 
flitting over his head! 

“Stand by, men; he stirs,” cried Starbuck, as the three lines sud- 
denly vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, 
as by magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that 
every oarsmen felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved 
in great part from the downward strain at the bows, the boats gave 
a sudden bounce upwards, as a small icefield will, when a dense herd 
of white bears are scared from it into the sea. 

“Haul in! Haul in!” cried Starbuck again; “he’s rising.” 

The lines of which, hardly an instant before, not one handbreath 
could have been gained, were now in long quick coils flung hack all 
dripping into the boats, and soon the whale broke water within two 
ship’s lengths of the hunters. 

His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most 
land animals there are certain valves or floodgates in many of their 
veins, whereby, when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least 
instantly shut off in certain directions. Not so with the whale; 
one of whose peculiarities it is to have an entire non-valvular structure 
of the blood-vessels, so that when pierced even by so small a point as 


330 


MOBY DICK; OR 

a harpoon, a deadly drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial 
system; and when this is heightened by the extraordinary pressure 
of water at a great distance below the surface, his life may be said 
to pour from him in incessant streams. Yet so vast is the quantity 
of blood in him, and so distant and numerous its interior fountains, 
that he will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period ; 
even as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is in the well- 
springs of far-off and undiscernible hills. Even now, when the 
boats pulled upon this whale, and perilously drew over his swaying 
flukes,, and the lances were darted into him, they were followed by 
steady jets from the newly made wounds, which kept continually 
playing, while the natural spout-hole in his head was only at intervals, 
however rapid, sending its affrightened moisture into the air. From 
this last vent no blood yet came, because no vital part of him had 
thus far been struck. His life, as they significantly call it, was un- 
touched. 

As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper 
part of his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was 
plainly revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes 
had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the 
knot-holes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points 
which the whale’s eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, 
horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old 
age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and 
be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry- 
makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that 
preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. Still rolling in his 
blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely discoloured bunch or 
protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the flank. 

“A nice spot,” cried Flask; “just let me prick him there once.” 

“Avast!” cried Starbuck; “there’s no need of that!” 

But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart 
an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into 
more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, 
with swift fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and 
their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask’s 


331 


THE WHITE WHALE 

boat and marring the bows. It was his death-stroke. For, by this 
time, so spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away 
from the wreck he had made; lay panting on his side, impotently 
flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over slowly revolved like 
a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his belly; lay like a 
log, and died. It was most piteous, that last expiring spout. As 
when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some 
mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings, the spray- 
column lowers and lowers to the ground — so the last, long, dying 
spout of the whale. 

Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the 
body showed symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled. 
Immediately, by Starbuck’s orders, lines were secured to it at different 
points, so that ere long every boat was a buoy; the sunken whale 
being suspended a few inches beneath them by the cords. By very 
heedful management, when the ship drew nigh, the whale was trans- 
ferred to her side, and was strongly secured there by the stiffest 
fluke-chains, for it was plain that unless artificially upheld, the body 
would at once sink to the bottom. 

It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the 
spade, the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded 
in his flesh, on the lower part of the bunch before described. But 
as the stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies 
of captured whales, with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and 
no prominence of any kind to denote their place; therefore, there 
must needs have been some other unknown reason in the present case 
fully to account for the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious 
was the fact of a lance-head of stone being found in him, not far 
from the buried iron, the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had 
darted that stone lance ? And when ? It might have been darted 
by some Nor’-West Indian long before America was discovered. 

What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this mon- 
strous cabinet there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to 
further discoveries, by the ship’s being unprecedentedly dragged over 
sideways to the sea, owing to the body’s immensely increasing tend- 
ency to sink. However, Starbuck, .who had the ordering of affairs, 


332 


MOBY DICK; OR 

hung on to it to the last; hung on to it so resolutely, indeed, that 
when at length the ship would have been capsized, if still persisting in 
locking arms with the body; then, when the command was given 
to break clear from it, such was the immovable strain upon the 
timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and cables were fastened, that 
it was impossible to cast them off. Meantime everything in the 
Pequod was aslant. To cross to the other side of the deck was like 

walking up the steep gabled roof of a house. The ship groaned and 

gasped. Many of the ivory inlayings of her bulwarks and cabins 
were started from their places, by the unnatural dislocation. In vain 
hand-spikes and crows were brought to bear upon the immovable 
fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the timber-heads; and so low 
had the whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be at 
all approached, while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed 
added to the sinking bulk, and the ship seemed on the point of going 
over. 

“Hold on, hold on, won’t ye ?” cried Stubb to the body ; “don’t be in 
such a devil of a hurry to sink! By thunder, men, we must do some- 
thing or go for it. Ho use prying there; avast, I say with your 

handspikes, and run one of ye for a prayer-book and a pen-knife, and 
cut the big chains.” 

“Knife? Aye, aye,” cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter’s 
heavy hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron, began 
slashing at the largest flukes-chains. But a few strokes, full of 
sparks, were given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest. 
With a terrific snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the 
carcase sank. 

How, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm 
Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately 
accounted for it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great 
buoyancy, with its side or belly considerably elevated above the sur- 
face. If the only whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and broken- 
hearted creatures, their pads of lard diminished and all their bones 
heavy and rheumatic; then you might with some reason assert that 
this sinking is caused by an uncommon specific gravity in the fish so 
sinking, consequent upon this absence of buoyant matter in him. But 
it is not so. For young whales, in the highest health, and swelling with 


333 


THE WHITE WHALE 

noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May of 
life, with all their panting lard about them ; even these brawny buoyant 
heroes do sometimes sink. 

Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less liable to this 
accident than any ether species. Where one of that sort goes down, 
twenty Bight Whales do. This difference in the species is no doubt 
imputable in no small degree to the greater quantity of bone in the 
Bight Whale; his Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more 
than a ton; from this incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free. 
But there are instances where, after the lapse of many hours or several 
days, the sunken whale rises again, more buoyant than in life. But 
the reason of this is obvious. Gases are generated in him; he swells 
to a prodigious magnitude ; becomes a sort of animal balloon. A line- 
of-battle ship could hardly keep him under then. In the Shore Whal- 
ing, on soundings, among the Bays of New Zealand, when a Bight 
Whale gives token of sinking, they fasten buoys to him, with plenty 
of rope; so that when the body has gone down, they know where to 
look for it when it shall have ascended again. 

It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard 
from the Pequod’s mastheads, announcing that the J ungfrau was again 
lowering her boats; though the only spout in sight was that of a Bin- 
Back, belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its 
incredible power of swimming. Nevertheless, the Fin-Back’s spout is 
so similar to the Sperm Whale’s, that by unskilful fishermen it is often 
mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all his host were now 
in valiant chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all 
sail, made after her four young keels, and thus they all disappeared 
far to leeward, still in bold, hopeful chase. 

Oh ! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend. 


CHAPTEB LXXXI 

THE HONOUR AND GLORY OF WHALING 

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the 
true method. 


334 


MOBY DICK; OR 

The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches 
up to the very springhead of it, so much the more am I impressed with 
its great honourableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so 
many great demigods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way 
or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the re- 
flection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so em- 
blazoned a fraternity. 

The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and 
to the eternal honour of our calling be it said, that the first whale at- 
tacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those 
were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to 
succour the distressed, and not to fill men’s lamp-feeders. Every one 
knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda ; how the lovely An- 
dromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, 
and as Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the 
prince of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and 
delivered and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic ex- 
ploit, rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; in- 
asmuch as this Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let 
no man doubt this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, 
on the Syrian coast, in one of the pagan temples, there stood for many 
ages the vast skeleton of a whale, which the city’s legends and all the 
inhabitants asserted to be the identical bones of the monster that Per- 
seus slew. When the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was 
carried to Italy in triumph. What seems most singular and suggestively 
important in this story, is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail. 

Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda — indeed, by some 
supposed to be indirectly derived from it — is that famous story of St. 
George and the Dragon ; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale ; 
for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled 
together, and often stand for each other. “Thou art as a lion of the 
waters, and as a dragon of sea,” saith Ezekiel; hereby, plainly mean- 
ing a whale ; in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. 
Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. 
George but encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of 
doing battle with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a 


335 


THE WHITE WHALE 

snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them 
to march boldly up to a whale. 

Let not the modem paintings of this scene mislead us; for though 
the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely 
represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted 
on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance 
of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists ; 
and considering that as in Perseus’ case, St. George’s whale might 
have crawled up out of the sea on the beach ; and considering that the 
animal ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or 
sea-horse; bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether in- 
compatible with the sacred legend and the ancientest drafts of the 
scene, to hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan 
himself. In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this 
whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philis- 
tines, Dagon by name ; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his 
horse’s head and both the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only 
the stump or fishy part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own 
noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; 
and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in 
the most noble order of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights 
of that honourable company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever 
had to do with a whale like their great patron), let them never eye a 
Nantucketer with disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred 
trousers we are much better entitled to St. George’s decoration than 
they. 

Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long 
remained dubious : for though according to the Greek mythologies, that 
antique Crockett and Kit Carson — that brawny doer of rejoicing good 
deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether 
that strictly makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It 
nowhere appears that he ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, 
from the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary 
whaleman ; at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. 
I claim him for one of our clan. 

But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of Her- 


336 


MOBY DICK; OR 

cules and the whale is considered to be derived from the still more 
ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versa ; certainly 
they are very similar. If I claim the demigod then, why not the 
prophet ? 

Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the 
whole roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for 
like royal kings of old times, we find the head waters of our fraternity 
in nothing short of the great gods themselves. That wondrous Oriental 
story is now to be rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread 
Vishnu, one of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos ; gives 
us this divine Vishnu himself for our Lord; — Vishnu, who, by the 
first of his ten earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified 
the whale. When Brahm, or the God of gods, saith the Shaster, re- 
solved to recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he 
gave birth to Vishnu, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mys- 
tical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to 
Vishnu before beginning the creation, and which therefore must have 
contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, 
these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the water; so Vishnu became 
incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths, 
rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnu a whaleman, then? 
even as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman ? 

Perseus, St. George, Hercules, J onah, and Vishnu ! there’s a member- 
roll, for you ! What club but the whaleman’s can head off like that ? 

CHAPTER LXXXII 

JONAH HISTORICALLY REGARDED 

Reference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the whale 
in the preceding chapter. Now some Nantucketers rather distrust 
this historical story of Jonah and the whale. But then there were some 
sceptical Greeks and Romans, who, standing out from the orthodox 
pagans of their times, equally doubted the story of Hercules and the 
whale, and Arion and the dolphin ; and yet their doubting those tradi- 
tions did not make those traditions one whit the less facts, for all that. 


THE WHITE WHALE 


337 


One old Sag-Harbour whaleman’s chief reason for questioning the 
Hebrew story was this: — He had one of those quaint old-fashioned 
Bibles, embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which 
represented Jonah’s whale with two spouts in his head^-a peculiarity 
only true with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, 
and the varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have 
this saying, “A penny roll would choke him”; his swallow is so very 
small. But, to this, Bishop J ebb’s anticipative answer is ready. It is 
not necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in 
the whale’s belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. 
And this seems reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the 
Right Whale’s mouth would accommodate a couple of whist tables, and 
comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have 
ensconced himself in a hollow tooth ; but, on second thoughts, the Right 
Whale is toothless. 

Another reason which Sag-Harbour (he went by that name) urged 
for his want of faith in this matter of the prophet, was something ob- 
scurely in reference to his incarcerated body and the whale’s gastric 
juices. But this objection likewise falls to the ground, because a Ger- 
man exegetist supposed that Jonah must have taken refuge in the float- 
ing body of a dead whale — even as the French soldiers in the Russian 
campaign turned their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them. 
Besides, it has been divined by other continental commentators, that 
when Jonah was thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straight- 
way effected his escape to another vessel near by, some vessel with a 
whale for a figure-head ; and, I would add, possibly called The Whale, 
as some crafts are nowadays christened the Shark, the Gull , and the 
Eagle. Nor have there been wanting learned exegetists who have 
opined that the whale mentioned in the book of Jonah merely meant 
a life-preserver — an inflated bag of wind — which the endangered 
prophet swam to, and so was saved from a watery doom. Poor Sag- 
Harbour, therefore, seems worsted all around. But he had still another 
reason for his want of faith. It was this, if I remember right : J onah 
was swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and after three 
days he was vomited up somewhere within three days’ journey of Nin- 
eveh, a city on the Tigris, ’very much more than three days’ journey 


338 MOBY DICK; OR 

across from the nearest point of the Mediterranean coast. How is 
that ? 

But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within 
that short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He might have carried him 
round by the way of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to speak of the 
passage through the whole length of the Mediterranean, and another 
passage up the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, such a supposition would 
involve the complete circumnavigation of all Africa in three days, not 
to speak of the Tigris waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shal- 
low for any whale to swim in. Besides, this idea of Jonah’s weath- 
ering the Cape of Good Hope at so early a day would wrest the honour 
of the discovery of that great headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its 
reputed discoverer, and so make modern history a liar. 

But all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbour only evinced 
his foolish pride of reason — a thing still more reprehensible in him, 
seeing that he had but little learning except what he had picked up from 
the sun and the sea. I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, 
and abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy. Por 
by a Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah’s going to 
Nineveh via the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magni- 
fication of the general miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, 
the highly enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the historical story 
of Jonah. And some three centuries ago, an English traveller in old 
Harris’s Voyages , speaks of a Turkish Mosque built in honour Gf 
Jonah, in which mosque was a miraculous lamp that burned without 
any oil. 


CHAPTER LXXXIII 

PITCHPOLING 

To make them run easily and swiftly the axles of carriages are 
anointed; and for much the same purpose, some whalers perform an 
analogous operation upon their boat; they grease the bottom. Nor is it 
to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm, it may possibly 
be of no contemptible advantage ; considering that oil and water are 


339 


THE WHITE WHALE 

hostile; that oil is a sliding thing, and that the object in view is to 
make the boat slide bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing 
his boat, and one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau 
disappeared, took more than customary pains in that occupation ; crawl- 
ing under its bottom, where it hung over the side, and rubbing in the 
unctuousness as though diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from 
the craft’s bald keel. He seemed to be working in obedience to 
some particular presentiment. Nor did it remain unwarranted by the 
event. 

Towards noon whales were raised ; but so soon as the ship sailed down 
to them, they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a disordered 
flight, as of Cleopatra’s barges from Actium. 

Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb’s was foremost. By great 
exertion, Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron; but the 
stricken whale, without at all sounding, still continued his horizontal 
flight with added fleetness. Such unintermitted strainings upon the 
planted iron must sooner or later inevitably extract it. It became 
imperative to lance the flying whale, or be content to lose him. But to 
haul the boat up to his flank was impossible, he swam so fast and fu- 
rious. What then remained? 

Of all the wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and 
countless subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced, 
none exceed that fine manoeuvre with the lance called pitchpoling. 
Small sword, or broad sword, in all its exercises boasts nothing like it. 
It is only indispensable with an inveterate running whale; its grand 
fact and feature is the wonderful distance to which the long lance is ac- 
curately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat, under extreme 
headway. Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some ten or 
twelve feet in length ; the staff is much slighter than that of the harpoon, 
and also of a lighter material — pine. It is furnished with a small 
rope called a warp, of considerable length, by which it can be hauled 
back to the hand after darting. 

But before going further, it is important to mention here, that though 
the harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the lance, yet it 
is seldom done; and when done, is still less frequently successful, on 
account of the greater weight and inferior length of the harpoon as 


340 


MOBY DICK; OR 

compared with the lance, which in effect become serious drawbacks. 
As a general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before 
any pitchpoling comes into play. 

Look now at Stubb ; a man who from his humorous, deliberate cool- 
ness and equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially qualified 
to excel in pitchpoling. Look at him ; he stands upright in the tossed 
bow of the flying boat; wrapped in fleecy foam, the towing whale is 
forty feet ahead. Handling the long lance lightly, glancing twice or 
thrice along its length to see if it be exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly 
gathers up the coil of the warp in one hand, so as to secure its free end 
in his grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed. Then holding the lance 
full before his waistband’s middle, he levels it at the whale; when, 
covering him with it, he steadily depresses the butt-end in his hand, 
thereby elevating the point till the weapon stands fairly balanced upon 
his palm, fifteen feet in the air. He reminds you somewhat of a jug- 
gler, balancing a long staff on his chin. Next moment with a rapid, 
nameless impulse, in a superb lofty arch the bright steel spans the 
foaming distance, and quivers in the life spot of the whale. Instead of 
sparkling water, he now spouts red blood. 

“That drove the spigot out of him!” cries Stubb. “ ’Tis July’s im- 
mortal Fourth; all fountains must run wine to-day! Would now it 
were old Orleans whisky, or old Ohio, or unspeakable old Monongahela ! 
Then, Tashtego, lad, I’d have ye hold a cannakin to the jet, and we’d 
drink round it! Yea, verily, hearts alive, we’d brew choice punch in 
the spread of his spout-hole there, and from that live punch-bowl quaff 
the living stuff!” 

Again and again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart is re- 
peated, the spear returning to its master like a greyhound held in skil- 
ful leash. The agonised whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is 
slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and 
mutely watches the monster die. 

CHAPTER LIXXIV 

THE FOUNTAIN 

That for six thousand years — and no one knows how many millions 


341 


THE WHITE WHALE 

of ages before — the great whales should have been spouting all over the 
sea, and sprinkling and mystifying the gardens of the deep, as with so 
many sprinkling or mystifying pots ; and that for some centuries back, 
thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the 
whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings — that all this should 
be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter 
minutes past one o’clock v. m. of this sixteenth day of December, a. d. 
1850), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, 
after all, really water, or nothing but vapour — this is surely a note- 
worthy thing. 

Let us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items 
contingent. Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their 
gills, the finny tribes in general breathe the air which at all times is 
combined with the element in which they swim; hence, a herring or 
a cod might live a century, and never once raise his head above the 
surface. But owing to his marked internal structure which gives him 
regular lungs, like a human being’s, the whale can only live by inhaling 
the disengaged air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore the necessity 
for his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot in any de- 
gree breathe through his mouth, for, in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm 
Whale’s mouth is buried at least eight feet beneath the surface; and 
what is still more, his windpipe has no connection with his mouth. No, 
he breathes through his spiracle alone; and this is on the top of his 
head. 

If I say, that in any creature breathing is only a function indispen- 
sable to vitality, inasmuch as it withdraws from the air a certain ele- 
ment, which being subsequently brought into contact with the blood 
imparts to the blood its vivifying principle, I do not think I shall 
err; though I may possibly use some superfluous scientific words. 
Assume it, and it follows that if all the blood in a man could be aerated 
with one breath, he might than seal up his nostrils and not fetch another 
for a considerable time. That is to say, he would then live without 
breathing. Anomalous as it may seem, this is precisely the case 
with the whale, who systematically lives, by intervals, his full 
hour and more (when at the bottom) without drawing a single breath, 
or so much as in any way inhaling a particle of air ; for remember, he 
has no gills. How is this? Between his ribs and on each side of 


342 


MOBY DICK; OR 

his spine he is supplied with a remarkable involved Cretan labyrinth 
of vermicelli-like vessels, which vessels, when he quits the surface, are 
completely distended with oxygenated blood. So that for an hour or 
more, a thousand fathoms in the sea, he carries a surplus stock of 
vitality in him, just as the camel crossing the waterless desert carries 
a surplus supply of drink for future use in its four supplementary 
stomachs. The anatomical fact of this labyrinth is indisputable ; 
and that the supposition founded upon it is reasonable and true, 
seems the more cogent to me, when I consider the otherwise inex- 
plicable obstinacy of that leviathan in having his spoutings out, as 
the fishermen phrase it. This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon 
rising to the surface, the Sperm Whale will continue there for a 
period of time exactly uniform with all his other unmolested risings. 
Say he stays eleven minutes, and jets seventy times, that is, respires 
seventy breaths ; then whenever he rises again, he will be sure to have 
his seventy breaths over again, to a minute. How, if after he fetches 
a few breaths you alarm him, so that he sounds, he will be always 
dodging up again to make good his regular allowance of air. And not 
till those seventy breaths are told, will he finally go down to stay 
out his full term below. Remark, however, that in different indi- 
viduals these rates are different; but in any one they are alike. 
How, why should the whale thus insist upon having his spoutings 
out, unless it be to replenish his reservoir of air, ere descending for 
good? How obvious is it, too, that this necessity for the whale’s ris- 
ing exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase. For not by 
hook or by net could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing a 
thousand fathoms beneath the sunlight. Hot so much thy skill, 
then, O hunter, as the great necessities that strike the victory to 
thee! 

In man, breathing is incessantly going on — one breath only serv- 
ing for two or three pulsations; so that whatever other business he 
has to attend to, waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or die he 
will. But the Sperm Whale only breathes about one-seventh or Sun- 
day of his time. 

It has been said that the whale only breathes through his spout- 
hole; if it could truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with 


343 


THE WHITE WHALE 

water, then I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his 
sense of smell seems obliterated in him ; for the only thing about 
him that at all answers to his nose is that identical spout-hole; and 
being so clogged with two elements, it could not be expected to have 
the J>ower of smelling. But owing to the mystery of the spout — 
whether it be water or whether it be vapour — no absolute cer- 
tainty can as yet be arrived at on this head. Sure it is, neverthe- 
less, that the Sperm Whale has no proper olfactories. But what 
does he want of them ? No roses, no violets, no Cologne-water in the 
sea. 

Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his 
spouting canal, and as that long canal — like the Grand Erie Canal — 
is furnished with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the down- 
ward retention of air or the upward exclusion of water, therefore the 
whale has no voice; unless you insult him by saying, that when he 
so strangely rumbles, he talks through his nose. But then again 
what has the whale to say ? Seldom have I known any profound being 
that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out 
something by way of getting a living. Oh! happy that the world is 
such an excellent listener! 

Now, the spouting canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as 
it is for the conveyance of air, and for several feet laid along, hor- 
izontally, just beneath the upper surface of his head, and a little 
to one side ; this curious canal is very much like a gas-pipe laid down 
in a city on one side of a street. But the question returns whether 
this gas-pipe is also a water-pipe; in other words, whether the spout 
of the Sperm Whale’s is the mere vapour of the exhaled breath, or 
whether that exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in at the 
mouth, and discharged through the spiracle. It is certain that the 
mouth indirectly communicates with the spouting canal; but it can- 
not be proved that this is for the purpose of discharging water 
through the spiracle. Because the greatest necessity for so doing 
would seem to be, when in feeding he accidentally takes in water. 
But the Sperm Whale’s food is far beneath the surface, and there 
he cannot spout even if he would. Besides, if you regard him 
very closely, and time him with your watch, you will find that 


344 


MOBY DICK; OR 

when unmolested* there is an undeviating rhyme between the periods 
of his jets and the ordinary periods of respiration. 

But why pester one with all this reasoning on the subject ? Speak 
out! You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can 
you not tell water from air? My dear sir, in this world it is not 
so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain 
things the knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you 
might almost stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is 
precisely. 

The central body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist en- 
veloping it; and how can you certainly tell whether any water falls 
from it, when, always, when you are close enough to a whale to get 
a close view of his spout, he is in a prodigious commotion, the water 
cascading all around him. And if at such time you should think that 
you really perceived drops of moisture in the spout, how do you know 
that they are not merely condensed from its vapour; or how do you 
know that they are not those identical drops superficially lodged in 
the spout-hole fissure, which is counter-sunk into the summit of the 
whale’s head? For even when tranquilly swimming through the mid- 
day sea in a calm, with his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary’s 
in the desert; even then, the whale always carries a small basin of 
water on his head, as under a blazing sun you will sometimes see a 
cavity in a rock filled up with rain. 

Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to he over-curious touching 
the precise nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to be 
peering into it, and putting his face in it. You cannot go with 
your pitcher to this fountain and fill it, and bring it away. For even 
when coming into slight contact with the outer, vapoury shreds 
of the jet, which will often happen, your skin will feverishly smart, 
from the acridness of the thing so touching it. And I know one, who 
coming into still closer contact with the spout, whether- with some 
scientific object in view, or otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled 
off from his cheek and arm. Wherefore, among whalemen, the spout 
is deemed poisonous; they try to evade it. Another thing; I have 
heard it said, and I do not much doubt it, that if the jet is fairly 


THE WHITE WHALE 345 

spouted into your eyes, it will blind you. The wisest thing the in- 
vestigator can do then, it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout 
alone. 

Still, we can hypothesise, even if we cannot prove and establish. 
My hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist. And 
beside other reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by consider- 
ations touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm 
Whale. I account him no common, shallow being, inasmuch as it 
is an undisputed fact that he is never found on soundings, or near 
shores ; all other whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and 
profound. And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponder- 
ous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, Jupiter, Dante, and 
so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the 
act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on 
Eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere 
long saw reflected there, a curious involved worming and undula- 
tion in the atmosphere over my head. The invariable moisture of 
my hair, while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea 
in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon; this seems an addi- 
tional argument for the above supposition. 

And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, 
to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, 
mild head overhung by a canopy of vapour, engendered by his in- 
communicable contemplations, and that vapour — as you will some- 
times see it — glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its 
seal upon his thoughts. For, d’ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear 
air ; they only irradiate vapour. And so, through -all the thick mist 
of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then 
shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank 
God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few 
along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and 
intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither 
believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with 
equal eye. 


346 


MOBY DICK; OR 


CHAPTER LXXXV 

THE TAIL 

Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the ante- 
lope, and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less 
celestial, I celebrate a tail. 

Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale’s tail to begin at that 
point of the trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it 
comprises upon its upper surface alone, an area of a least fifty 
square feet. The compact round body of its root expands into two 
broad, firm, fat palms or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less than an 
inch in thickness. At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly 
overlap, then sideways recede from each other like wings, leaving a 
wide vacancy between. In no living thing are the lines of beauty 
more exquisitely defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes. 
At its utmost expansion in the full-grown whale, the tail will con- 
siderably exceed twenty feet across. 

The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; 
but cut into it, and you find that three distinct strata compose it: — 
upper, middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper and lower layers, 
are long and horizontal ; those of the middle one, very short, and run- 
ning crosswise between the outside layers. This triune structure, as 
much as anything else, imparts power to the tail. To the student of 
old Roman walls, the middle layer will furnish a curious parallel to 
the thin course of tiles always alternating with the stone in those 
wonderful relics of the antique, and which undoubtedly contribute so 
much to the great strength of the masonry. 

But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not 
enough, the whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and 
woof of muscular fibres and filaments, which passing on either side 
the loins and running down into the flukes, insensibly blend with 
them, and largely contribute to their might; so that in the tail the 
confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated 
to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing 
to do it. 


THE WHITE WHALE 347 

Nor does this- — its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the 
graceful flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates 
through a Titanism of power. On the contrary, those motions derive 
their most appalling beauty from it. Real strength never impairs 
beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything impos- 
ingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic. Take away 
the tied tendons that all over seem bursting from the marble in the 
carved Hercules, and its charm would be gone. As devout Eckerman 
lifted the linen sheet from the naked corpse of Goethe, he was over- 
whelmed with the massive chest of the man, that seemed as a Roman 
triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God the Father in human 
form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever they may reveal 
of the divine love in the Son, the soft,, curled hermaphroditical Italian 
pictures, in which his idea has been most successfully embodied ; these 
pictures, so destitute as they are of all brawniness, hint nothing of 
any power, but the mere negative, feminine one of submission and 
endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, form the peculiar prac- 
tical virtues of his teachings. 

Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that whether 
wielded in sport, or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be the mood 
it he in, its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace. Therein 
no fairy’s arm can transcend it. 

Five great motions are peculiar to it. First, when used as a fin 
for progression ; Second, when used as a mace in battle ; Third, in 
sweeping; Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes. 

First: Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan’s tail acts 
in a different manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It 
never wriggles. In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority. To 
the whale, his tail is the sole means of propulsion. Scrollwise coiled 
forwards beneath the body, and then rapidly sprung backwards, it is 
this which gives that singular darting, leaping motion to the monster 
when furiously swimming. His side-fins only serve to steer by. 

Second: It is a little significant, that while one sperm whale only 
fights another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, in 
his conflicts with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail. 
Iu striking at a boat, he swiftly curves away his flukes from it, 


348 


MOBY DICK; OR 

and the blow is only inflicted by the recoil. If it be made in the un- 
obstructed air, especially if it descend to its mark, the stroke is then 
simply irresistible. No ribs of man or boat can withstand it. 
Your only salvation lies in eluding it ; but if it comes sideways through 
the opposing water, then partly owing to the light bouyancy of the 
whale boat, and the elasticity of its materials, a cracked rib or a 
dashed plank or two, a sort of stitch in the side, is generally the 
most serious result. These submerged side blows are so often re- 
ceived in the fishery, that they are accounted mere child’s play. 
Someone strips off a frock, and the hole is stopped. 

Third: I cannot demonstrate it, but it seems to me, that in the 
whale the sense of touch is concentrated in the tail ; for in this respect 
there is a delicacy in it only equalled by the daintiness of the ele- 
phant’s trunk. This delicacy is chiefly evinced in the action of 
sweeping, when in maidenly gentleness the whale with a certain soft 
slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the surface 
of the sea; and if he feel but a sailor’s whisker, woe to that sailor, 
whiskers and all. What tenderness there is in that preliminary touch ! 
Had this tail any prehensile power, I should straightway bethink me 
of Darmonodes’ elephant that so frequented the flower-market, and 
with low salutations presented nosegays to damsels, and then caressed 
their zones. On more accounts than one, a pity it is that the whale 
does not possess this prehensile virtue in his tail ; for I have heard of 
yet another elephant, that when wounded in the fight, curved round 
his trunk and extracted the dart. 

Fourth: Stealing unawares upon the whale in the fancied security 
of the middle of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the vast 
corpulence of his dignity, and kitten-like, he plays on the ocean as if 
it were a hearth. But still you see his power in his play. The broad 
palms of his tail are flirted high into the air ; then smiting the surface, 
the thunderous concussion resounds for miles. You would think a 
great gun had been discharged; and if you noticed the light wreath 
of vapour from the spiracle at his other extremity, you would think 
that that was the smoke from the touch-hole. 

Fifth: As in the ordinary floating posture of the leviathan the 
flukes lie considerably below the level of his back, they are then com- 


349 


THE WHITE WHALE 

pletely out of sight beneath the surface; but when he is about to plunge 
into the deeps, his entire flukes with at least thirty feet of his body 
are tossed erect in the air, and so remain vibrating a moment, till they 
downwards shoot out of view. Excepting the sublime breach — some- 
where else to be described — this peaking of the whale’s flukes is per- 
haps the grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the 
bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching 
at the highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan 
thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw in the flame Baltic of Hell. 
But in gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in ; if in 
the Dantean, the devils will occur to you ; if in that of Isaiah, the arch- 
angels. Standing at the masthead of my ship during a sunrise that 
crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the 
east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in con- 
cert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand 
embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, 
the home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified 
of the African elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing 
him the most devout of all beings. For according to King Juba, the 
military elephants of antiquity often hailed the morning with their 
trunks uplifted in the profoundest silence. 

The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the 
elephant, so far as some aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk 
of the other are concerned, should not tend to place those two opposite 
organs on an equality, much less the creatures to which they respectively 
belong. For as the mighty elephant is but a terrier to Leviathan, so, 
compared with Leviathan’s tail, his trunk is but the stalk of a lily. 
The most direful blow from the elephant’s trunk were as the playful tap 
of a fan, compared with the measureless crush and crash of the sperm 
whale’s ponderous flukes, which in repeated instances have one after the 
other.hurled entire boats with all their oars and crews into the air, very 
much as an Indian juggler tosses his balls . 1 

1 Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale 
and the elephant is preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the elephant 
stands in much the same respect to the whale that a dog does to the elephant ; 
nevertheless, there are not wanting some points of curious similitude; among 
these is the spout. It is well known that the elephant will often draw up 
water or dust in his trunk, and then elevating it, jet it forth in a stream. 


350 


MOBY DICK; OR 

The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my 
inability to express it. At times there are gestures in it,,- which, though 
they would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable. 
In an extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these mystic 
gestures, that I have heard hunters who have declared them akin to 
Freemason signs and symbols ; that the whale, indeed, by these methods 
intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there wanting other 
motions of the whale in his general body, full of strangeness, and 
unaccountable to his most experienced assailant. Dissect him how 
I may, then, I go but skin deep; I know him not, and never shall. 
But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his 
head ? much more, how comprehend his face, when he has none ? 


CHAPTER LXXXVI 

THE GRAND ARMADA 

The long and narrow peninsula of Malacca, extending south-eastward 
from the territories of Burmah, forms the most southerly point of all 
Asia. In a continuous line from that peninsula stretch the long islands 
of Sumatra, Java, Bally, and Timor; which, with many others, forms 
a vast mole, or rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with Australia, 
and dividing the long unbroken Indian Ocean from the thickly 
studded Oriental archipelagoes. This rampart is pierced by several 
sally-ports for the convenience of ships and whales ; conspicuous among 
which are the straits of Sunda and Malacca. By the Straits of Sunda, 
chiefly, vessels bound to China from the West, emerge into the China 
seas. 

Those narrow Straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java ; and stand- 
ing midway in that vast rampart of islands, buttressed by that bold 
green promontory, known to seamen as Java Head; they not a little 
correspond to the central gateway opening into some vast walled em- 
pire ; and considering the inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and 
jewels, and gold, and ivory, with which the thousand islands of that 
Oriental sea are enriched, it seems significant provision of nature, that 
such treasures, by the very formation of the land, should at least 


351 


THE WHITE WHALE 

bear the appearance, however ineffectual, of being guarded from the 
all-grasping western world. The shores of the Straits of Sunda are 
unsupplied with those domineering fortresses which guard the en- 
trances to the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Propontis. Un- 
like the Danes, these Orientals do not demand the obsequious homage 
of lowered topsails from the endless procession of ships before the wind, 
which for centuries past, by night and by day, have passed between 
the islands of Sumatra and Java, freighted with the costliest cargoes 
of the East. But while they freely waive a ceremonial like this, 
they do by no means renounce their claim to more solid tribute. 

Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among 
the low shaded coves and islets of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the 
vessels sailing through the straits, fiercely demanding tribute at the 
point of their spears. Though by the repeated bloody chastisements 
they have received at the hands of European cruisers, the audacity of 
these corsairs has of late been somewhat repressed; yet, even at the 
present day, we occasionally hear of English and American vessels, 
which, in those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged. 

With a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these 
straits; Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Javan sea; 
and thence, cruising northwards, over waters known to be frequented 
here and there by the Sperm Whale, sweep inshore by the Philippine 
Islands, and gain the far coast of Japan, in time for the great whal- 
ing season there. By these means, the circumnavigating Pequod 
would sweep almost all the known Sperm Whale cruising-grounds of the 
world, previous to descending upon the Line in the Pacific; where 
Ahab, though everywhere else foiled in his pursuit, firmly counted 
upon giving battle to Moby Dick, in the sea he was most known 
to frequent; and at a season when he might most reasonably be pre- 
sumed to be haunting it. 

But how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does 
his crew drink air? Surely, he will stop for water. Hay. For a 
long time, now, the circus-running sun has raced within his fiery ring, 
and needs no sustenance but what’s in himself. So Ahab. Mark this, 
too, in the whaler. While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, 
to be transferred to foreign wharves; the world-wandering whale ship 
carries no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. 


352 


MOBY DICK; OR 

She has a whole lake’s contents bottled in her ample hold. She is 
ballasted with utilities ; not altogether with unusable pig-lead and kent- 
edge. She carries years’ water in her. Clear old prime Nantucket 
water; which, when three years afloat, the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, 
prefers to drink before the brackish fluid, but yesterday rafted off in 
casks, from the Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is, that, while 
other ships may have gone to China from New York, and back again, 
touching at a score of ports, the whale ship, in all that interval, may 
not have sighted one grain? of soil; her crew having seen no man but 
floating seamen like themselves; so that did you carry them the news 
that another flood had come, they would only answer — “Well, boys, 
here’s the ark!” 

Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured on the western 
coast of Java, in the near vicinity of the Straits of Sunda; indeed, as 
most of the ground, round about, was generally recognised by the fisher- 
men as an excellent spot for cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained 
more and more upon Java Head, the lookouts were repeatedly hailed, 
and admonished to keep wide awake. But though the green, palmy 
cliffs of the land so loomed on the starboard bow, and with delighted 
nostrils the fresh cinnamon was snuffed in the air, yet not a single jet 
was descried. Almost renouncing all thought of falling in with any 
game hereabouts, the ship had well-nigh entered the straits, when the 
customary cheering cry was heard from aloft, and ere long a spectacle 
of singular magnificence saluted us. 

But here be it premised, that owing to the unwearied activity with 
which of late they have been hunted over all four oceans, the Sperm 
Whales, instead of almost invariably sailing in small detached com- 
panies, as in former times, are now frequently met with in extensive 
herds, sometimes embracing so great a multitude, that it would almost 
seem as if numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and 
covenant for mutual assistance and protection. To this aggregation 
of the Sperm Whale into such immense caravans, may be imputed the 
circumstance that even in the best cruising-grounds, you may now 
sometimes sail for weeks and months together, without being greeted 
by a single spout; and then be suddenly saluted by what sometimes 
seems thousands on thousands. 


THE WHITE WHALE 353 

Broad on both bows, at the distance of two or three miles, and form- 
ing a great semi-circle, embracing one half of the level horizon, a con- 
tinuous chain of whale- jets were up-playing and sparkling in the noon- 
day air. Unlike the straight perpendicular twin-jets of the Bight 
Whale, which, dividing at top, fall over in two branches, like the cleft 
drooping boughs of a willow, the single forward-slanting spout of the 
Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of white mist, continually 
rising and falling away to leeward. 

Seen from the Pequod’s deck, then, as she would rise on a high hill 
of the sea, this host of vapoury spouts, individually curling up into 
the air, and beheld through a blending atmosphere of bluish haze, 
showed like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, 
descried of a balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height. 

As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the moun- 
tains, accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous passage 
in their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the 
plain ; even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward 
through the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their semi- 
circle, and swimming on in one solid but still crescentic centre. 

Crowding all sail the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers 
handling their weapons, and loudly cheering from the heads of their yet 
suspended boats. If the wind only held, little doubt had they, that 
chased through these Straits of Sunda, the vast host would only de- 
ploy in the Oriental seas to witness the capture of not a few of their 
number. And who could tell whether, in that congregated caravan, 
Moby Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like the 
worshipped white elephant in the coronation procession of the Siamese ! 
So with stunsail piled on stunsail, we sailed along, driving these levia- 
thans before us; when, of a sudden, the voice of Tashtego was heard, 
loudly directing attention to something in our wake. 

Corresponding to the crescent in our van, we beheld another in our 
rear. It seemed formed of detached white vapours, rising and falling 
something like the spouts of the whales; only they did not so com- 
pletely come and go; for they constantly hovered, without finally dis- 
appearing. Levelling his glass at this sight, Ahab quickly revolved 
in his pivot-hole, crying, “Aloft there, and rig whips and buckets to 
wet the sails ; — Malays, sir, and after us 1” 


354 


MOBY DICK; OR 

As if too long lurking behind the headlands, till the Pequod should 
fairly have entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now in hot 
pursuit, to make up for their over-cautious delay. But when the 
swift Pequod , with a fresh leading wind, was herself in hot chase; 
how very kind of these tawny philanthropists to assist in speeding 
her on to her own chosen pursuit, — mere riding-whips and rowels to 
her, that they were. As with glass under arm, Ahab to and fro 
paced the deck ; in his forward turn beholding the monsters he chased, 
and in the after one the bloodthirsty pirates chasing him; some such 
fancy as the above seemed his. And when he glanced upon the green 
walls of the watery defile in which the ship was then sailing, and be- 
thought him that through that gate lay the route to his vengeance, 
and beheld, how that through that same gate he was now both chasing 
and being chased to his deadly end; and not only that, but a herd of 
remorseless wild pirates and inhuman atheistical devils were infernally 
cheering them on with their curses; — when all these conceits had 
passed through his brain, Ahab’s brow was left gaunt and ribbed, 
like the black sand beach after some stormy tide has been gnawing it, 
without being able to drag the firm thing from its place. 

But thoughts like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and 
when, after steadily dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the 
Pequod at last shot by the vivid green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra 
side, emerging at last upon the broad waters beyond; then, the har- 
pooneers seemed more to grieve that the swift whales had been gaining 
upon the ship, than to rejoice that the ship had so victoriously gained 
upon the Malays. But still driving on in the wake of the whales, at 
length they seemed abating their speed; gradually the ship neared 
them; and the wind now dying away, word was passed to spring to 
the boats. But no sooner did the herd, by some presumed wonderful 
instinct of the Sperm Whale, become notified of the three keels that 
were after them, — though as yet a mile in their rear, — than they 
rallied again, and forming in close ranks and battalions, so that their 
spouts all looked like flashing lines of stacked bayonets, moved on with 
redoubled velocity. 

Stripped to our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, and 
after severals hours’ pulling were almost disposed to renounce the 
chase, when a general pausing commotion among the whales gave 


©QiKieS2SS 





© Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. 


THE MALAYS ARE AFTER ITS 



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355 


THE WHITE WHALE 

animating token that they were now at last under the influence of that 
strange perplexity of inert irresolution, which when the fishermen per- 
ceive it in the whale, they say he is gallied . 1 The compact martial 
columns in which they had been hitherto rapidly and steadily swim- 
ming, were now broken up in one measureless rout; and like King 
Porus’ elephants in the Indian battle with Alexander, they seemed going 
mad with consternation. In all directions expanding in vast irreg- 
ular circles, and aimlessly swimming hither and thither, by their short 
thick spoutings, they plainly betrayed their distraction of panic. 
This was still more strangely evinced by those of their number, who, 
completely paralysed as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged 
dismantled ships on the sea. Had these leviathans been but a flock 
of simple sheep, pursued over the pasture by three fierce wolves, 
they could not possibly have evinced such excessive dismay. But this 
occasional timidity is characteristic of almost all herding creatures. 
Though banding together in tens of thousands, the lion-maned buffa- 
loes of the West have fled before a solitary horseman. Witness, too, 
all human beings, how when herded together in the sheepfold of a 
theatre’s pit, they will, at the slightest alarm of fire, rush helter- 
skelter for the outlets, crowding, trampling, jamming, and remorse- 
lessly dashing each other to death. Best, therefore, withhold any 
amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no 
folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the 
madness of men. 

Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent mo- 
tion, yet it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither ad- 

1 To gaily , or gallow, is to frighten excessively, — to confound with fright. 
It is an old Saxon word. It occurs once in Shakespeare — 

“The wrathful skies 

Gallow the very wanderers of the dark, 

And make them keep their caves.” 

Lear, Act iii. Scene 2. 

To common land usages, the word is now completely obsolete. When the 
polite landsman first hears it from the gaunt Nantucketer, he is apt to set 
it down as one of the whaleman’s self-derived savageries. Much the same 
is it with many other sinewy Saxonisms of this sort, which emigrated to the 
New England rocks with the noble brawn of the old English emigrants in the 
time of the Commonwealth. Thus, some of the best and farthest English 
descended words — the etymological Howards and Percy s — are now demo- 
cratised, nay plebeianised, so to speak, in the New World. 


356 


MOBY DICK; OR 

vanced nor retreated, but collectively remained in one place. As is 
customary in those cases, the boats at once separated, each making for 
some one lone whale on the outskirts of the shoal. In about three 
minutes’ time, Queequeg’s harpoon was flung; the stricken fish darted 
blinding spray in our faces, and then running away with us like light, 
steered straight for the heart of the herd. Though such a movement on 
the part of the whale struck under such circumstances, is in nowise un- 
precedented ; and indeed is almost always more or less anticipated ; yet 
does it present one of the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery; 
for as the swift monster drags you deeper and deeper into the frantic 
shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a delirious 
throb. 

As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer 
power of speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to 
him; as we thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as 
we flew, by the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our 
beset boat was like a ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest, and striv- 
ing to steer through their complicated channels and straits, knowing 
not at what moment it may be locked in and crushed. 

But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheer- 
ing off from this monster directly across our route in advance; now 
edging away from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended over- 
head, while all the time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in 
hand, pricking out of our way whatever whales he could reach by 
short darts, for there was no time to make long ones. Nor were the 
oarsmen quite idle, though their wonted duty was now altogether 
dispensed with. They chiefly attended to the shouting part of the 
business. “Out of the way, Commodore !” cried one, to a great drom- 
edary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface, and for an instant 
threatened to swamp us. “Hard down with your tail, there!” cried 
a second to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed calmly cool- 
ing himself with his own fan-like extremity. 

All whaleboats carry certain curious contrivances, Originally in- 
vented by the Nantucket Indians called “druggs.” Two thick squares 
of wood of equal size are stoutly clenched together, so that they cross 
each other’s grain at right angles ; a line of considerable length is then 
attached to the middle of this block and the other end of the line be- 


THE WHITE WHALE 357 

ing looped, it can in a moment be fastened to a harpoon. It is chiefly 
among gallied whales that this drugg is used. For then, more whales 
are close round you than you can possibly chase at one time. But 
sperm whales are not every day encountered ; while you may, then, you 
must kill all you can. And if you cannot kill them all at once, you 
must wing them, so that they can be afterwards killed at your leisure. 
Hence it is, that at times like these, the drugg comes into requisition. 
Our boat was furnished with three of them. The first and second were 
successfully darted, and we saw the whales staggeringly running off, 
fettered by the enormous sidelong resistance of the towing drugg. 
They were cramped like malefactors with the chain and ball. But 
upon flinging the third, in the act of tossing overboard the clumsy 
wooden block, it caught under one of the seats of the boat, and in an 
instant tore it out and carried it away, dropping the oarsman in the 
boat’s bottom as the seat slid from under him. On both sides the 
sea came in at the wounded planks, but we stuffed two or three drawers 
and shirts in, and so stopped the leaks for the time. 

It had been next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons, were 
it nut that as we advanced into the herd, our whale’s way greatly 
diminished; moreover, that as we went still farther and farther 
from the circumference of commotion, the direful disorders seemed 
waning. So that when at last the jerking harpoon drew out, and the 
towing whale sideways vanished; then, with the tapering force of his 
parting momentum, we glided between two whales into the innermost 
heart of the shoal, as if from some mountain torrent we had slid into 
a serene valley lake. Here the storms in the roaring glens between 
the outermost whales, were heard but not felt. In this central expanse 
the sea presented that smooth satin-like surface, called a sleek, produced 
by the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale in his more quiet 
moods. Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks 
at the heart of every commotion. And still in the distracted distance 
we beheld the tumults of the outer concentric circles, and saw succes- 
sive pods of whales, eight or ten in each, swiftly going round and 
round, like multipled spans of horses in a ring ; and so closely shoulder 
to shoulder, that a Titanic circus-rider might easily have overarched 
the middle ones, and so have gone round on their backs. Owing to the 
density of the crowd of reposing whales, more immediately surround- 


358 


MOBY DICK; OR 

ing the embayed axis of the herd, no possible chance of escape was at 
present afforded us. We must watch for a breach in the living wall 
that hemmed us in; the wall that had only admitted us in order to 
shut us up. Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally 
visited by small tame cows and calves; the women and children of 
this routed host. 

Kow, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving 
outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in 
any one of those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by 
the whole multitude, must have contained at least two or three square 
miles. At any rate — though indeed such a test at such a time might 
be deceptive — spoutings might be discovered from our low boat that 
seemed playing up almost from the rim of the horizon. I mention 
this circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had been pur- 
posely locked up in this innermost fold; and as if the wide extent of 
the herd had hitherto prevented them from learning the precise cause 
of its stopping; or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and 
every way innocent and inexperienced; however it may have been, 
these smaller whales — now and then visiting our becalmed boat from 
the margin of the lake — evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confi- 
dence, or else a still becharmed panic which it was impossible not to 
marvel at. Like household dogs they came snuffing round us, right up 
to our gunwales, and touching them; till it almost seemed that some 
spell had suddenly domesticated them. Queequeg patted their fore- 
heads; Starbuck scratched their backs with his lance; but fearful of 
the consequences, for the time refrained from darting it. 

But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and 
still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, sus- 
pended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers 
of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly 
to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable 
depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling 
will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two 
different lives at the time ; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, 
be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence; — even 
so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not 


THE WHITE WHALE 359 

at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulf weed in their new-born sight. 
Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. 
One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed 
hardly a day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, 
and some six feet in girth. He was a little frisky; though his body 
seemed scarce yet recovered from that irksome position it had so 
lately occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all 
ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar’s 
bow. The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly 
retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears newly ar- 
rived from foreign parts. 

“Line! line!” cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; “him fast! 
him fast ! — Who line him ? Who struck ? — Two- whale ; one big, one 
little!” 

“What ails ye, man ?” cried Starbuck. 

“Look-e here,” said Queequeg, pointing down. 

As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hun- 
dreds of fathoms of rope ; as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, 
and shows the slackened curling line buoyantly rising and spiralling 
towards the air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord 
of Madame Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to 
its dam. Not seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this natural 
line, with the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with the hempen 
one, so that the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the subtlest secrets 
of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw 
young Leviathan amours in the deep . 1 

And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consterna- 
tions and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely 
and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely 

1 The Sperm whale, as with all other species of the leviathan, but unlike 
most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation which 
may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a time; 
though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and Jacob, a 
contingency provided for in suckling by two teats, curiously situated, one on 
each side of the anus; but the breasts themselves extend upwards from that. 
When by chance these pervious parts of a nursing whale are cut by the 
hunter’s lance, the mother’s pouring milk and blood rivallingly discolour 
the sea for rods. The rnilk is very sweet and rich ; it has been tasted by man, 


360 


MOBY DICK; OR 

revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed 
Atlantic of my being, do I -myself still for ever centrally disport in mute 
calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round 
me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mild- 
ness of joy. 

Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic 
spectacles in the distance evinced the activity of the other boats, still 
engaged in drugging the whales on the frontier of the host ; or possibly 
carrying on the war* within the first circle, where 'abundance of room 
and some convenient retreats were afforded them. But the sight of 
the enraged drugged whales now and then blindly darting to and fro 
across the circles, was nothing to what at last met our eyes. It is 
sometimes the custom when fast to a whale more than commonly pow- 
erful and alert, to seek to hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or 
maiming his gigantic tail-tendon. It is done by darting a short- 
handled cutting-spade, to which is attached a rope for hauling it back 
again. A wounded whale (as we afterwards learned) in this part, 
but not effectually, as it seemed, had broken away from the boat, carry- 
ing along with him half of the harpoon line ; and in the extraordinary 
agony of the wound, he was now dashing among the revolving circles 
like the lone mounted desperado Arnold, at the battle of Saratoga, 
carrying dismay wherever he went. 

But agonising as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling 
spectacle enough, any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he 
seemed to inspire the rest of the herd, was owing to a cause which at 
first the intervening distance obscured from us. But at length we 
perceived that by one of the unimaginable accidents of the fishery, this 
whale had become entangled in the harpoon-line that he towed; he 
had also run away with the cutting-spade in him; and while the free 
end of the rope attached to that weapon had permanently caught 
the coils of the harpoon-line round his tail, the cutting-spade it- 
self had worked loose from his flesh. So that tormented to madness, 
he was now churning through the water, violently flailing with his 
flexible tail, and tossing the keen spade about him, wounding and 
murdering his own comrades. 

This terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their 
stationary fright. First, the whales forming the margin of our lake 


THE WHITE WHALE 361 

began to crowd a little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted by 
half-spent billows from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to 
heave and swell; the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries van- 
ished; in more and more contracting orbits the whales in the more 
central circles began to swim in thickening clusters. Yes, the long 
calm was departing. A low advancing hum was soon heard ; and then 
like to the tumultuous masses of block-ice when the great river Hudson 
breaks up in spring, the entire host of whales came tumbling upon 
their inner centre, as if to pile themselves up in one common mountain. 
Instantly Starbuck and Queequeg changed places ; Starbuck taking the 
stem. 

“Oars! Oars!” he intensely whispered, seizing the helm — “gripe 
your oars, and clutch your souls, now! My God, men, stand by! 
Shove him off, you Queequeg — the whale there! — prick him! — hit 
him! Stand up — stand up, and stay so! Spring, men — pull, men; 
never mind their backs — scrape them ! — scrape away !” 

The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks, 
leaving a narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths. But by 
desperate endeavour we at last shot into a temporary opening ; then giv- 
ing way rapidly, and at the same time earnestly watching for another 
outlet. After many similar hair-breadth escapes, we at last swiftly 
glided into what had just been one of the outer circles, but now 
crossed by random whales, all violently making for one centre. This 
lucky salvation was cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg’ s hat, 
who, while standing in the bows to prick the fugitive whales, had his 
hat taken clean from his head by the air-eddy made by the tossing of a 
pair of broad flukes close by. 

Riotous- and disordered as the universal commotion now was, it 
soon resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for hav- 
ing clumped together at last in one dense body, they then renewed their 
onward flight with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless; 
but the boats still lingered in their wake to* pick up what drugged 
whales might be dropped astern, and likewise to secure one which 
Flask had killed and waifed. The waif is a «pennoned pole, two or 
three of which are carried by every boat ; and which, when additional 
game is at hand, are inserted upright into the floating body of a dead 


362 


MOBY DICK; OR 

whale, both to mark its place on the sea, and also as token of prior 
possession, should the boats of any other ship draw near. 

The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that 
sagacious saying in the Fishery, — the more whales the less fish. Of all 
the drugged whales only one was captured. The rest contrived to 
escape for the time, hut only to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, 
by some other craft than the Pequod. 


CHAPTEK LXXXVII 

SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS 

The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of 
Sperm Whales, and there was also then given the probable cause in- 
ducing those vast aggregations. 

Now, though such great bodies are at times encountered, yet, as 
must have been seen, even at the present day, small detached bands are 
occasionally observed, embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each. 
Such bands are known as schools. They generally are of two sorts; 
those composed almost entirely of females, and those mustering none 
but young vigorous males, or bulls, as they are familiarly designated. 

In cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see 
a male of full grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm, 
evinces his gallantry by falling in the rear and covering the flight of 
his ladies. In truth, this gentleman is a luxurious Ottoman, swimming 
about over the watery world, surroundingly accompanied by all the 
solaces and endearments of the harem. The contrast between this 
Ottoman and his concubines is striking; because, while he is always 
of the largest leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full growth, 
are not more than one-third of the bulk of an averaged-sized male. 
They are comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed 
half a dozen yards around the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be 
denied, that upon the whole they are hereditarily entitled to embon- 
point. 

It is very curious to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent 
ramblings. Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move in 


363 


THE WHITE WHALE 

leisurely search of variety. You meet them on the Line in time for 
the full flower of the Equatorial feeding season, having just returned, 
perhaps from spending the summer in the Northern seas, and so cheat- 
ing summer of all unpleasant weariness and warmth. By the time 
they have lounged up and down the promenade of the Equator awhile, 
they start for the Oriental waters in anticipation of the cool season 
there, and so evade the other excessive temperature of the year. 

When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange 
suspicious sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his in- 
teresting family. Should any unwarrantably pert young Leviathan 
coming that way, presume to draw confidentially close to one of the 
ladies, with what prodigious fury the Bashaw assails him, and chases 
him away ! High times, indeed, if unprincipled young rakes like him 
are to be permitted to invade the sanctity of domestic bliss; though 
do what the Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most notorious Lothario 
out of his bed; for, alas, all fish bed in common. As ashore, the 
ladies often cause the most terrible duels among their rival admirers; 
just so with the whales, who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all 
for love. They fence with their long lower jaws, sometimes locking 
them together, and so striving for the supremacy like elks that war- 
ringly interweave their antlers. Not a few are captured having the 
deep scars of these encounters, — furrowed heads, broken teeth, scol- 
loped fins; and in some instances, wrenched and dislocated mouths. 

But supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away 
at the first rush of the harem’s lord, then is it very diverting to watch 
that lord. Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among them again 
and revels there awhile, still in tantalising vicinity to young Lothario, 
like pious Solomon devoutly worshipping among his thousand con- 
cubines. Granting other whales to be in sight, the fisherman will 
seldom give chase to one of these Grand Turks ; for these Grand Turks 
are too lavish of their strength, and hence their unctuousness is small. 
As for the sons and the daughters they beget, why, those sons and 
daughters must take care of themselves ; at least, with only the maternal 
help. For like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that might be 
named, my Lord Whale has no taste for the nursery, however much for 
the bower; and so being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous 


364 MOBY DICK; OR 

babies all over the world ; every baby an exotic. In good time, never- 
theless, as the ardour of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; 
as reflection lends her seldom pauses ; in short, as a general lassitude 
overtakes the sated Turk ; then a love of ease and virtue supplants the 
love for maidens ; our Ottoman enters upon the repentant, admonitory 
stage of life, forswears, disbands the harem, and grown to an exemplary, 
sulky old soul, goes about all alone among the meridians and parallels 
saying his prayers, and warning each young Leviathan from his juve- 
nile errors. 

Now, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so 
is the lord and master of that school technically known as the school- 
master. It is therefore not in strict character, however admirably 
satirical, that after going to school himself, he should then go abroad 
inculcating not what he learned there, but the folly of it. His title, 
schoolmaster, would very naturally seem, derived from the name be- 
stowed upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the man 
who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read the 
memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a country 
schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and 
what was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of 
his pupils. 

The same secludedness and isolation to which the: schoolmaster 
whale betakes himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged 
Sperm Whales. Almost universally, a lone whale — as a solitary 
Leviathan is called — proves an ancient one. Like venerable moss- 
bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no one near him but Nature her- 
self ; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best 
of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets. 

The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, pre- 
viously mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For 
while those female whales are characteristically timid, the young 
males, or forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the most pug- 
nacious of all Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to en- 
counter ; excepting those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, some- 
times met, and these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a 
penal gout. 


365 


THE WHITE WHALE 

The F orty-barr el-bull schools are larger than the harem schools. 
Like a mob of young collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wicked- 
ness, tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that 
no prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a 
riotous lad at Yale or Harvard. They soon relinquish this turbulence 
though, and when about three-fourths grown, break up, and separately 
go about in quest of settlements, that is, harems. 

Another point of difference between the male and female schools 
is still more characteristic of the sexes. Say you strike a Forty-barrel- 
bull, poor devil ! all his comrades quit him. But strike a member of 
the harem school, and her companions swim around her with every 
token of concern, sometimes lingering so near her and so long, as them- 
selves to fall a prey. 


CHAPTEE LXXXVIII 

FAST-FISH AND LOOSE-FISH 

The allusion to the waif and waif-poles in the last chapter but one, 
necessitates some account of the laws and regulations of the whale fish- 
ery, of which the waif may be deemed the grand symbol and badge. 

It frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in com- 
pany, a whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally 
killed and captured by another vessel; and herein are indirectly com- 
prised many minor contingencies, all partaking of this one grand 
feature. For example, — after a weary and perilous chase and capture 
of a whale, the body may get loose from the ship by reason of a violent 
storm ; and drifting far away to leeward, be retaken by a second whaler, 
who, in a calm, snugly tows it alongside, without risk of life or line. 
Thus the most vexatious and violent disputes would often arise between 
the fishermen, were there not some written or unwritten, universal, un- 
disputed law applicable to all cases. 

Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorised by legislative en- 
actment was that of Holland. It was decreed by the States-General 
in a. d. 1695. But though no other nation has ever had any written 
whaling law, yet the American fishermen have been their own legislators 


366 


MOBY DICK; OR 

and lawyers in this matter. They have provided a system which for 
terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian’s Pandects and the By- 
laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other 
People’s Business. Yes; these laws might be engraved on a Queen 
Anne’s farthing, or the barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so 
small are they. 

I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it. 

II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it. 

But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable 

brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to ex- 
pound it. 

First : What is a Fast-Fish ? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, 
when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at 
all controllable by the occupant or occupants, — a mast, an oar, a nine- 
inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same. 
Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other 
recognised symbol of possession ; so long as the party waiting it plainly 
evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their in- 
tention so to do. 

These are scientific commentaries ; but the commentaries of the whale- 
men themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks — the 
Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist. True, among the more upright and 
honourable whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar cases, 
where it would be an outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim 
possession of a whale previously chased or killed by another party. 
But others are by no means so scrupulous. 

Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover litigated 
in England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a hard chase of a 
whale in the Northern seas they (plaintiffs) had succeeded in harpoon- 
ing the fish ; but at last, through peril of their lives, were obliged to for- 
sake not only their lines, but their boat itself. — Furthermore, ultimately 
the defendants (the crew of another ship) came up with the whale, 
struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it before the very eyes of 
the plaintiffs. Yet again: — and when those defendants were remon- 
strated with, their captain snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs’ teeth, 
and assured them that by way of doxology to the deed he had done, he 
would now retain their line, harpoons, and boat, which had remained 


THE WHITE WHALE 367 

attached to the whale at the time of the seizure. Wherefore the plain- 
tiffs now sued for the recovery of the value of their whale, line, har- 
poons, and boat. 

Mr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was 
the judge. In the course of the defence, the witty Erskine went on to 
illustrate his position, by alluding to a recent crim. con. case, wherein a 
gentleman, after in vain trying to bridle his wife’s viciousness, had at 
last abandoned her upon the seas of life; but in the course of years, 
repenting of that step, he instituted an action to recover possession of 
her. He then proceeded to say that, though the gentleman had origi- 
nally harpooned the lady, and at once had her fast, and only by reason 
of the great stress of her plunging viciousness, had at last abandoned her ; 
yet abandon her he did, so that she became a loose-fish ; and therefore 
when a subsequent gentleman reharpooned her, the lady then became 
that subsequent gentleman’s property, along with whatever harpoon 
might have been found sticking in her. 

How in the present case Erskine contended that the examples of the 
whale and the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other. 

These pleadings, and the counter-pleadings, being duly heard, the 
very learned judge in set terms decided, to wit, — That as for the boat, 
he awarded it to the plaintiffs, because they had merely abandoned it to 
save their lives; hut that with regard to the controverted whale har- 
poons, and line, they belonged to the defendants ; the whale, because it 
was a Loose-Fish at the time of the final capture; and the harpoons and 
line because when the fish jnade off with them, it (the fish) acquired a 
property in those articles ; and hence anybody who afterwards took the 
fish had a right to them. How the plaintiffs afterwards took the fish ; 
ergo, the aforesaid articles were theirs. 

A common man looking at this decision of the very learned Judge 
might possibly object to it. But ploughed up to the primary rock of the 
matter, the two great principles laid down the twin whaling laws 
previously quoted, and applied and elucidated by Lord Ellenborough in 
the above cited case; these two laws touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, 
I say, will, on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human juris- 
prudence ; for notwithstanding its complicated tracery of sculpture, the 
Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the Philistines, has but two 
props to stand on. 


368 


MOBY DICK; OR 

Is it not a saying in every one’s mouth, Possession is half of the law : 
that is, regardless of how the thing came* into possession ? But often 
possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of 
Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Past-Fish, whereof possession 
is the whole of the law ? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow’s 
last mite but a Fast-Fish ? What is yonder undetected villain’s marble 
mansion with a door-plate for a waif; what is that hut a Fast-Fish? 
What is the ruinous discount which Mordeeai, the broker, gets from 
poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone’s family 
from starvation ; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish ? What 
is the Archbishop of Savesoul’s income of £100,000 seised from the 
scant bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed 
labourers; what is that globular £100,000 but a Fast-Fish ? What are 
the Duke of Dunder’s hereditary towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? 
What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a 
Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas 
but a Fast-Fish ? And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole 
of the law? 

But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the 
kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is inter- 
nationally and universally applicable. 

What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus 
struck the Spanish standard by way of waiting it for his royal master 
and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the 
Turk ? What India to England ? What at last will Mexico be to the 
United States ? All Loose-Fish. 

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but 
Loose-Fish? What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? 
What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? 
What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of 
thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose- 
Fish! And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, 
too ? 


THE WHITE WHALE 

CHAPTER LXXXIX 


369 


HEADS! OR TAILS! 

“De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam ” 

Bracton, l. 8 , c. 3. 

Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with 
the context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the 
coast of that land, the Ring, as Honorary Grand Harpooneer, must 
have the head, and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail — 
a division which, in the whale, is much like halving an apple ; there is 
no intermediate remainder. How as this law, under a modified form, is 
to this day in force in England; and as it offers in various respects a 
strange anomaly touching the general law of Fast and Loose-Fish, it is 
here treated of in a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle 
that prompts the English railways to be at the expense of a separate car, 
specially reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the first place, 
in curious proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is still in force, 
I proceed to lay before you a circumstance that happened within the 
last two years. 

It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some 
one of the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing 
and beaching a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off 
from the shore. How the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under 
the Jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden. 
Holding the office directly from the crown, I believe, all the royal emol- 
uments incident to the Cinque Port territories become by assignment 
his. By some writers this office is called a sinecure. But not so. 
Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times in fobbing his 
perquisites; which are his chiefly by virtue of that same fobbing of 
them. 

How when these poor sunburnt mariners bare-footed and with their 
trousers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their fat 
fish high and dry, promising themselves a good £150 from the precious 
oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and 
good ale with their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares ; 
up steps a very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman, 


370 


MOBY DICK; OR 

with a copy of Blackstone under his arm ; and laying it upon the whale’s 
head, he says — “Hands off! this fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I 
seise it as the Lord Warden’s.” Upon this the poor mariners in their 
respectful consternation — so truly English — knowing not what to say, 
fall to vigorously scratching their heads all round ; meanwhile ruefully 
glancing from the whale to the stranger. But that did in nowise mend 
the matter, or at all soften the hard heart of the learned gentleman with 
the copy of Blackstone. At length one of them, after long scratching 
about for his ideas, made hold to speak. 

“Please, sir, who is the Lord Warden ?” 

“The Duke.” 

“But the Duke had nothing to do with taking this fish ?” 

“It is his.” 

“We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expence, and is 
all that to go to the Duke’s benefit; we getting nothing at all for our 
pains but our blisters ?” 

“It is his.” 

“Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of 
getting a livelihood ?” 

“It is his.” 

“I thought to relieve my old bedridden mother by part of my share of 
this whale.” 

“It is his.” 

“Won’t the Duke be content with a quarter or a half ?” 

“It is his.” 

In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of 
Wellington received the money. Thinking that viewed in some particu- 
lar lights, the case might by a hare possibility in some small degree be 
deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an honest clergyman 
of the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him to 
take the case of those unfortunate mariners into full consideration. To 
which my Lord Duke in substance replied (both letters were published) 
that he had already done so, and received the money, and would be 
obliged to the reverend gentleman if for the future he (the reverend 
gentleman) would decline meddling with other people’s business. 

It will readily he seen that in this case the alleged right of the Duke 
to the whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We must needs 


371 


THE WHITE WHALE 

inquire then on what principles the Sovereign is originally invested 
with that right. The law itself has already been set forth. But Plow- 
don gives us the reason for it. Says Plowden, the whale so caught 
belongs to the King and Queen, “because of its superior excellence.” 
And by the soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent 
argument in such matters. 

In his treaties on “Queen-Gold,” or Queen-pinmoney, an old King’s 
Bench author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth : “Ye tail is ye 
Queen’s, that ye Queen’s wardrobe may he supplied with ye whalebone.” 
Xow this was written at a time when the black limber bone of the Green- 
land or Bight whale was largely used in ladies’ bodices. But this 
same hone is not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake 
for a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to 
be presented with a tail ? An allegorical meaning may lurk here. 

There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers — the 
whale and the sturgeon ; both royal property under certain limitations, 
and nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown’s ordinary rev- 
enue. I know not that any other author has hinted of the matter ; but 
by inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the 
same way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic 
head peculiar to that fish, which symbolically regarded, may possibly 
be humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus 
there seems a reason in all things, even in law. 


CHAPTEK XC 

THE PEQUOD MEETS THE ROSEBUD 

“In vain it was to rake for ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan, 
insufferable fetor denying not inquiry.” 

Sir T. Browne , V. E. 

It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when 
we were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapoury, midday sea, that the many 
noses on the Pequod’s deck proved more vigilant discoverers than the 
three pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was 
smelt in the sea. 


372 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“I will bet something now,” said Stubb, “that somewhere hereabouts 
are some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day. I thought 
they would keel up before long.” 

Presently, the vapours in advance slid aside ; and there in the distance 
lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must 
be alongside. As we glided nearer, the stranger showed F rench colours 
from his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-foul that 
circled, and hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the 
whale alongside must be what the fisherman call a blasted whale, that 
is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an un- 
appropriated corpse. It may well be conceived, what an unsavoury 
odour such a mass must exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the 
plague, when the living are incompetent to bury the departed. So in- 
tolerable indeed is it regarded by some, that no cupidity could persuade 
them to moor alongside of it. Yet are there those who will still do it ; 
notwithstanding the fact that the oil obtained from such subjects is of 
a very inferior quality, and by no means of the nature of attar-of-rose. 

Coming still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the French- 
man had a second whale alongside ; and this second whale seemed even 
more of a nosegay than the first. In truth, it turned out to be one of 
those problematical whales that seem to dry up and die with a sort of 
prodigious dyspepsia, or indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies al- 
most entirely bankrupt of anything like oil. Nevertheless, in the 
proper place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will ever turn 
up his nose at such a whale as this, however much he may shun blasted 
whales in general. 

The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, that Stubb vowed 
he recognised his cuttle spade-pole entangled in the lines that were 
knotted round the tail of one of these whales. 

“There’s a pretty fellow, now,” he banteringly laughed, standing in 
the ship’s bows; “there’s a jackal for ye! I well know that the Crap- 
poes of Frenchmen are but poor devils in the fishery; sometimes lower- 
ing their boats for breakers, mistaking them for Sperm Whale spouts ; 
yes, and sometimes sailing from their port with their hold full of boxes 
of tallow candles, and cases of snuffers, foreseeing that all the oil they 
will get won’t be enough to dip the captain’s wick into ; aye, we all know 
these things ; but look ye, here’s a Crappo that is content with our leav- 


THE WHITE WHALE 


373 


ings, the drugged whale there, I mean; aye, and is content too with 
scraping the dry bones of that other precious fish he has there. Poor 
devil ! I say, pass round a hat, some one, and let’s make him a present 
of a little oil for dear charity’s sake. For what oil he’ll get from that 
drugged whale there, wouldn’t be fit to burn in a jail; no, not in a 
condemned cell. And as for the other whale, why, I’ll agree to get more 
oil by chopping up and trying out these three masts of ours, than he’ll 
get from that bundle of bones ; though, now that I think of it, it may 
contain something worth a good deal more than oil ; yes, ambergris. I 
wonder now if our old man has thought of that. It’s worth trying. 
Yes, I’m in for it” ; and so saying he started for the quarter-deck. 

By this time the faint air had become a complete calm; so that 
whether or no, the Pequod was now fairly entrapped in the smell, with 
no hope of escaping except by its breezing up again. Issuing from 
the cabin, Stubb now called his boat’s crew, and pulled off for the 
stranger. Drawing across her bow, he perceived that in accordance 
with the fanciful French taste, the upper part of her stem-piece was 
carved in the likeness of a huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and 
for thorns had copper spikes projecting from it here and there; the 
whole terminating in a symmetrical folded bulb of a bright red colour. 
Upon her headboards, in large gilt letters, he read “Bouton-de-Rose ,” — 
Rosebutton, or Rosebud; and this was the romantic name of this aro- 
matic ship. 

Though Stubb did not understand the Bouton part of the inscription, 
yet the word rose , and the bulbous figure-head put together, sufficiently 
explained the whole to him. 

“A wooden rosebud, eh ?” he cried with his hands to his nose ; “that 
will do very well ; but how like all creation it smells !” 

Now in order to hold direct communication with the people on deck, 
he had to pull round the bows to the starboard side, and thus come close 
to the blasted whale ; and so talk over it. 

Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he bawled 
— “Bouton-de-Rose, ahoy! are there any of you Bouton-de-Roses that 
speak English ?” 

“Yes,” rejoined a Guernsey man from the bulwarks, who turned out 
to be the chief mate. 


374 MOBY DICK; OR 

“Well, then, my Bouton-de-Eosebud, have you seen the White 
Whale ?” 

“What whale ?” 

“The White Whale — a Sperm Whale — Moby Dick, have ye seen 
him ?” 

“Never heard of such a whale. Cachalot Blanche ! White Whale — 
no.” 

“Very good, then; good-bye now, and I’ll call again in a minute.” 

Then rapidly pulling hack towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab 
leaning over the quarter-deck rail awaiting his report, he moulded his 
two hands into a trumpet and shouted — “No, sir ! No !” IJpon which 
Ahab retired, and Stubb returned to the Frenchman. 

He now perceived that the Guernsey man, who had just got into the 
chains, and was using a cutting-spade, had slung his nose in a sort of 
hag. 

“What’s the matter with your nose, there ?” said Stubb. “Broke it ?” 

“I wish it was broken, or that I didn’t have any nose at all,” answered 
the Guernsey man, who did not seem to relish the job he was at very 
much. “But what are you holding yours for ?” 

“Oh, nothing! It’s a wax nose; I have to hold it on. Fine day, 
ain’t it ? Air rather gardenny, I should say ; throw us a bunch of posies 
will ye, Bouton-de-Eose ?” 

“What in the devil’s name do you want here ?” roared the Guernsey 
man, flying into a sudden passion. 

“Oh ! keep cool — cool ? yes, that’s the word ; why don’t you pack those 
whales in ice while you’re working at ’em? But joking aside, though ; 
do you know, Eosebud, that it’s all nonsense trying to get oil out of such 
whales ? As for that dried up one there, he hasn’t a gill in his whole 
carcase.” 

“I know that well enough ; hut d’ye see, the captain here won’t believe 
it ; this is his first voyage ; he was a Cologne manufacturer before. But 
come aboard, and mayhap he’ll believe you, if he won’t me ; and so I’ll 
get out of this dirty scrape.” 

“Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow,” rejoined 
Stubb, and with that he soon mounted to the deck. There a queer 
scene presented itself. The sailors, in tasselled caps of red worsted, 
>vere getting the heavy tackles in readiness for the whales, But they 


375 


THE WHITE WHALE 

worked rather slow and talked very fast, and seemed in anything but 
a good humour. All their noses upwardly projected from their faces 
like so many jib-booms. How and then pairs of them would drop 
their work, and run up to the masthead to get some fresh air. Some 
thinking they would catch the plague, dipped oakum in coal-tar, and at 
intervals held it to their nostrils. Others having broken the stems of 
their pipes almost short off at the bowl, were vigorously puffing tobacco- 
smoke, so that it constantly filled their olfactories. 

Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding 
from the captain’s round-house abaft ; and looking in that direction saw 
a fiery face thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar from 
within. This was the tormented surgeon, who, after in vain remon- 
strating against the proceedings of the day, had betaken himself to 
the captain‘s round-house ( cabinet he called it) to avoid the pest; but 
still, could not help yelling out his entreaties and indignations at times. 

Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to 
the Guernsey man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger 
mate expressed his detestation of his captain as a conceited ignoramus, 
who had brought them all into so unsavoury, unprofitable a pickle. 
Sounding him carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey man 
had not the slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris. He there- 
fore held his peace on that head, but otherwise was quite frank and con- 
fidential with him, so that the two quickly concocted a little plan for 
both circumventing and satirising the captain, without his at all dream- 
ing of distrusting their sincerity. According to this little plan of theirs, 
the Guernsey man, under cover of an interpreter’s office, was to tell 
the captain what he pleased, but as coming from Stubb; and as for 
Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should come uppermost in him 
during the interview. 

By this time their destined victim appeared from his cabin. He 
was a small and dark, but rather delicate-looking man for a sea-captain, 
with large whiskers and moustache, however; and wore a red cotton 
velvet vest with watch-seals at his side. To this gentleman, Stubb was 
now politely introduced by the Guernsey man, who at once ostenta- 
tiously put on the aspect of interpreting between them. 

“What shall I say to him first ?” said he. 

“Why,” said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals, 


376 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“you may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort of babyish 
to me, though I don’t pretend to be a judge.” 

“He says, Monsieur,” said the Guernsey man, in French, turning 
to his captain, “that only yesterday his ship spoke a vessel ; whose cap- 
tain and chief mate, with six sailors, had all died of fever caught from 
a blasted whale they had brought alongside.” 

Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more. 

“W-hat now ?” said the Guernsey man to Stubb. 

“Why, since he takes it so easy, tell him that now I have eyed him 
carefully, I’m quite certain that he’s no more fit to command a whale 
ship than a St. Jago monkey. In fact, tell him from me he’s a ba- 
boon.” 

“He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried 
one, is far more deadly than the blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he 
conjures us, as we value our lives, to cut loose from these fish.” 

Instantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded 
his crew to desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once cast 
loose the cables and chains confining the whales to the ship. 

“What now?” said the Guernsey man, when the captain had re- 
turned to them. 

“Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that — that — 
in fact, tell him I’ve diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps 
somebody else.” 

“He says, Monsieur, that he’s very happy to have been of any serv- 
ice to us.” 

Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful par- 
ties (meaning himself and mate) and concluded by inviting Stubb 
down into his cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux. 

“He wants you to take a glass of wine with him,” said the inter- 
preter. 

“Thank him heartily; but tell him it’s against my principles to 
drink with the man I’ve diddled. In fact, tell him I must go.” 

“He says, Monsieur, that his principles won’t admit of his drink- 
ing; but that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then 
Monsieur had best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from 
these whales, for it’s so calm they won’t drift.” 

By this time Stubb was over the side, and, getting into his boat, 


377 


THE WHITE WHALE 

hailed the Guernsey man to this effect, — that having a long towline 
in his boat, he would do what he could to help them by pulling out 
the lighter whale of the two from the ship’s side. While the French- 
man’s boats then were engaged in towing the ship one way, Stubb 
benevolently towed away at his whale the other way, ostentatiously 
slacking out a most unusually long towline. 

Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the 
whale; hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his distance, 
while the Pequod slid in between him and Stubb’s whale. Whereupon 
Stubb quickly pulled to the floating body, and hailing the Pequod to 
give notice of his intentions, at once proceeded to reap the fruit of 
his unrighteous cunning. Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he commenced 
an excavation in the body, a little behind the side fin. You would 
almost have thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea; and 
when at length his spade struck against the gaunt ribs, it was like 
turning up old Homan tiles and pottery buried in fat English loam. 
His boat’s crew were all in high excitement, eagerly helping their 
chief, and looking as anxious as gold-hunters. 

And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and 
screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was begin- 
ning to look disappointed, especially as the horrible nosegay increased, 
when suddenly from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a 
faint stream of perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells 
without being absorbed by it, as one river will flow into and then along 
with another, without at all blending with it for a time. 

“I have it, I have it,” cried Stubb, with delight, striking, something 
in the subterranean regions; “a purse! a purse!” 

Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out hand- 
fuls of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled 
old cheese; very unctuous and savoury withal. You might easily 
dent it with your thumb ; it is of a hue between yellow and ash colour. 
And this, good friends, is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce 
to any druggist. Some six handfuls were obtained; but more was 
unavoidably lost in the sea, and still more, perhaps, might have been 
secured were it not for impatient Ahab’s loud command to Stubb to 
desist, and come on board, else the ship would bid them good-bye. 


378 


MOBY DICK; OR 

CHAPTER XCI 


AMBERGRIS 

Now tHis ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as 
an article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain 
Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on 
that subject. Eor at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late 
day, the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a prob- 
lem to the learned. Though the word ambergris is but the French 
compound for grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. 
For amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in 
some far inland soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon 
the sea. Besides, amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odourless 
substance, used for mouthpieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments ; but 
ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it 
is largely used in perfumery, in pastilles, precious candles, hair pow- 
ders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to 
Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter’s, 
in Rome. Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to 
flavour it. 

Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should 
regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a 
sick whale ! Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the 
cause, and by others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to 
cure such a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three 
or four boat-loads of Brandreth’s pills, and then running out of harm’s 
way, as labourers do in blasting rocks. 

I have forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris, cer- 
tain hard, round, bony plates which at first Stubb thought might be 
sailors’ trouser buttons; but it afterwards turned out that they were 
nothing more than pieces of small squid bones embalmed in that 
manner. 

Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be 
found in the heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of 
that saying of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorrup- 
tion; how that we are sown in dishonour, but raised in glory. And 


THE WHITE WHALE 379 

likewise call to mind that saying of Paracelsus about what it is that 
maketh the best musk. Also forget not the strange fact that of all 
things of ill-savour, Cologne water, in its rudimental manufacturing 
stages, is the worst. 

I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but can- 
not owing to my anxiety to repel a charge often made against whale- 
men, and which, in the estimation of some already biassed minds, might 
be considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of the 
Erenchman’s two whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous as- 
persion has been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is throughout 
a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing to rebut. 
They hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this odious 
stigma originate? 

I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the Green- 
land whaling ships in London, more than two centuries ago. Because 
those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as 
the southern ships have always done ; but cutting up the fresh blubber 
in small bits, thrust it through the bung-holes of large casks, and carry 
it home in that manner; the shortness of the season in those icy seas, 
and the sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed, for- 
bidding any other course. The consequence is, that upon breaking 
into the hold, and unloading one of these whale cemeteries, in the 
Greenland dock, a savour is given forth somewhat similar to that aris- 
ing from excavating an old city graveyard, for the foundation of a 
Lying-in Hospital. 

I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be 
likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, in former 
times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenherg, which 
latter name is the one used by the learned Eogo Yon Slack, in his great 
work on Smells , a text-book on that subject. As its name imports 
( Smeer , fat ; berg , to put up), this village was founded in order to afford 
a place for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to he tried out, without 
being taken home to Holland for that purpose. It was a collection of 
furnaces, fat-kettles, and oil sheds; and when the works were in full 
operation certainly gave forth no very pleasant savour. But all this is 
quite different with a South Sea Sperm Whaler ; which in a voyage of 
four years perhaps, after completely filling her hold with oil, does not, 


380 


MOBY DICK; OR 

perhaps, consume fifty days in the business of boiling out ; and in the 
state that it is casked, the oil is nearly scentless. The truth is, that 
living or dead, if hut decently treated, whales as a species are by no 
means creatures of ill odour ; nor can whalemen be recognised, as the 
people of the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by 
the nose. Nor indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant, 
when, as a general thing, he enjoys such high health ; taking abundance 
of exercise ; always out of doors ; though, it is true, seldom in the open 
air. I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale’s flukes above water dis- 
penses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a 
warm parlour. What then shall I liken the Sperm Whale to for fra- 
grance, considering his magnitude? Must it not be to that famous 
elephant, with jewelled tusks, and redolent with myrrh, which 
was led out of an Indian town to do honour to Alexander the 
Great ? 


CHAPTER XCII 

THE CASTAWAY 

It was hut some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a 
most significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod’s 
crew; an event most lamentable; which ended in providing the some- 
times madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever 
accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her 
own. 

Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. 
Some few hands are reserved called shipkeepers, whose province it is to 
work the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general 
thing, these shipkeepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising 
the boats’ crews. But if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy, 
or timorous wight in the ship, that wight is certain to be made a ship- 
keeper. It was so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nick- 
name, Pip by abbreviation. Poor Pip ! ye have heard of him before ; 
ye must remember his tambourine on that dramatic midnight, so 
gloomy-jolly. 

In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony 


381 


THE WHITE WHALE 

and a white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar colour, 
driven in one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by 
nature dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, 
was at bottom very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness 
peculiar to his tribe; a tribe which ever enjoy all holidays and festivi- 
ties with finer, freer relish than any other race. Por blacks, the year’s 
calendar should show naught hut three hundred and sixty-five Fourth 
of Julys and New Year’s Days. Nor smile so, while I write that this 
little black was brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold 
yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king’s cabinets. But Pip loved life, 
and all life’s peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business 
in which he had somehow unaccountably became entrapped, had most 
sadly blurred his brightness ; though, as ere long will be seen, what was 
thus temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be luridly 
illumined by strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to ten 
times the natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County in 
Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler’s frolic on the green ; 
and at melodious eventide, with his gay ha-ha, had turned the round 
horizon into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air 
of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond 
drop will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show 
you the diamond in its most impressive lustre, he lays it against a 
gloomy ground, and then lights it up, not by the sun, but by some un- 
natural gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally su- 
perb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the 
crystal skies, looks like some crown- jewel stolen from the King of Hell. 
But let us to the story. 

It came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb’s after-oarsman 
chanced so to sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite maimed ; 
and, temporarily, Pip was put into his place. 

The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervous- 
ness ; but happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale ; 
and therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb ob- 
serving him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his coura- 
geousness to the utmost, for he might often find it needful. 

Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; 
and as the fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which 


382 


MOBY DICK; OR 

happened in this instance to be right under poor Pip’s seat. The invol- 
untary consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in 
hand, out of the boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack whale 
line coming against his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so as 
to become entangled in it, when at last plumping into the water, that 
instant the stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line swiftly 
straightened ; and presto ! poor Pip came all foaming up to the chocks of 
the boat, remorselessly dragged there by the line, which had taken 
several turns around his chest and neck. 

Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt. 
He hated Pip for a poltroon. Snatching the boat-knife from his 
sheath, he suspended its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards 
Stubb, exclaimed interrogatively, “Cut?” Meantime Pip’s blue, 
choked face plainly looked, Do, for God’s sake ! All passed in a flash. 
In less than half a minute, this entire thing happened. 

“Damn him, cut!” roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip 
was saved. 

So soon as he recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed by 
yells and execrations from the crew. Tranquilly permitting these ir- 
regular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain, business-like, 
but still half-humorous manner, cursed Pip officially; and that done, 
unofficially gave him much wholesome advice. The substance was, 
Never jump from a boat, Pip, except — but all the rest was indefinite, as 
the soundest advice ever is. Now, in general, Stick to the boat , is your 
true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when Leap 
from the boat , is still better. Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if 
he should give undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be 
leaving him too wide a margin to jump in for the future, Stubb sud- 
denly dropped all advice, and concluded with a peremptory command, 
“Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I won’t pick you up if you 
jump, mind that. We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; 
a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. 
Bear that in mind, and don’t jump any more.” Hereby perhaps Stubb 
indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money- 
making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benev- 
olence. 


©C1K1G92S9 



© Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. 

TASHTEGO STOOD IN THE BOWS. HE WAS FULL OF THE FIRE OF THE HUNT. 



























































• 

























































383 


THE WHITE WHALE 

But we are all in the hands of the gods ; and Pip jumped again. It 
was under very similar circumstances to the first performance ; but this 
time he did not breast out the line ; and hence, when the whale started 
to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller’s trunk. 
Alas ! Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, boun- 
teous, blue day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching 
away, all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater’s skin hammered out 
to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s ebon head 
showed like a head of cloves. Ho boat-knife was lifted when he fell so 
rapidly astern. Stubb’s inexorable back was turned upon him ; and the 
whale was winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean 
was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip 
turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely casta- 
way, though the loftiest and the brightest. 

How, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the 
practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the 
awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self 
in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God ! who can tell it ? 
Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea — mark 
how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides. 

But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? 
Ho; he did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his 
wake, and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to 
Pip very quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerate- 
ness towards oarsmen jeopardised through their own timidity, is not 
always manifested by the hunters in all similar instances; and such 
instances not unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a 
coward, so called, is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar 
to military navies and armies. 

But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly 
spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and 
Stubb’s boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon 
his fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miser- 
ably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but 
from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at 
least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, 


384 


MOBY DICK; OR 

but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. 
Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of 
the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; 
and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and 
among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the mul- 
titudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of 
waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle 
of the loom, and spoke it ; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. 
So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal 
reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is 
absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised. 

For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in 
that fishery ; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what 
like abandonment befell myself. 


CHAPTER XCIII 

A SQUEEZE OF THE HAND 

That whale of Stubb’s so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the 
Pequod’s side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations pre- 
viously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of the 
Heidelburgh Tun, or Case. 

While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were em- 
ployed in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the 
sperm ; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully 
manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon. 

It had cooled and crystallised to such a degree,, that when, with 
several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I 
found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in 
the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into 
fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty ! No wonder that in old times this 
sperm was such a favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweet- 
ener ! such a softener ! such a delicious mollifier ! After having my 
hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, 
as it were, to serpentine and spiralise. 


385 


THE WHITE WHALE 

As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck ; after the hitter 
exertion at the windlass ; under a blue tranquil sky ; the ship under in- 
dolent sail, and gliding so serenely along ; as I bathed my hands among 
these soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the 
hour ; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opu- 
lence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontam- 
inated aroma, literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets ; I de- 
clare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow ; I forgot 
all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my 
hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan 
superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger ; 
while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or 
petulance, or malice, of any sort whatever. 

Squeeze ! squeeze ! squeeze ! all the morning long ; I squeezed 
that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm 
till a strange sort of insanity came over me ; and I found myself unwit- 
tingly squeezing my co-labourers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for 
the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving 
feeling did this avocation beget ; that at last I was continually squeezing 
their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as 
to say, — “Oh ! my dear fellow-beings, why should we longer cherish any 
social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humour or envy! Cbme; 
let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into 
each other ; let us squeeze universally into the very milk and sperm of 
kindness.” 

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever ! For now, 
since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in 
all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of 
attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the 
fancy ; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire- 
side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to 
squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw 
long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of sperma- 
ceti. 

How, while discoursing of sperm, it behoves to speak of other things 


386 MOBY DICK; OR 

akin to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try- 
works. 

First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the taper- 
ing part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It 
is tough with congealed tendons — a wad of muscles — but still contains 
some oil. After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is first 
cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer. They look much like 
blocks of Berkshire marble. 

Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts 
of the whale’s flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, 
and often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It 
is a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name 
imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked 
snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and 
purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason, 
it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole 
behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should conceive 
a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted, sup- 
posing him to have been killed the first day after the venison season, 
and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually fine 
vintage of the vineyards of Champagne. 

There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up 
in the course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling 
adequately to describe. It is called slobgollion ; an appellation original 
with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance. It is 
an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs 
of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I 
hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case 
coalescing. 

Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to Bight whalemen, 
but sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It desig- 
nates the dark glutinous substance which is scraped off the back of the 
Greenland or Bight whale, and much of which covers the decks of those 
inferior- souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan. 

Hippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale’s vocabu- 
lary. But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman’s nip- 


THE WHITE WHALE 387 

per is a short, firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part 
of Leviathan’s tail : it averages an inch in thickness, and for the rest, 
is about the size of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved along the 
oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee; and by nameless blan- 
dishments, as of magic, allures along with it all impurities. 

But to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at 
once to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its 
inmates. This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle 
for the blanket-pieces, when stripped and hoisted from the whale. 
When the proper time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apart- 
ment is a scene of terror to all tyros, especially by night. On one 
side, lit by a dull lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen. 
They generally go in pairs, — a pike-and-gaff-man and a spade-man. 
The whaling-pike is similar to a frigate’s boarding-weapon of the same 
name. The gaff is something like a boathook. With his gaff, the gaff- 
man hooks on to a sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, 
as the ship pitches and lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man 
stands on the sheet itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable 
horse-pieces. The spade is sharp as hone can make it ; the spade-man’s 
feet are shoeless; the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly 
slide away from him, like a sledge. If he cuts off one of his own toes, 
or one of his. assistants’, would you be very much astonished? Toes 
are scarce among veteran blubber-room men. 


CHAPTER XCIV 

THE cassock: 

Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this 
post-mortemising of the whale ; and had you strolled forward nigh the 
windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small 
curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have 
seen there, lying along lengthwise in the lee-scuppers. Hot the won- 
drous cistern in the whale’s* huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged 
lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail ; none of these would 
so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone, — longer 


388 


MOBY DICK; OR 

than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and 
jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, 
it is; or rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that 
found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for wor- 
shipping which, King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the 
idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly 
set forth in the fifteenth chapter of the First Book of Kings. 

Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and 
assisted by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners 
call it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a 
grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon 
the forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark 
pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the 
pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as 
almost to double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the 
rigging, to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some 
three feet of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two 
slits for arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily 
into it. The mincer now stands before you invested in the full ca- 
nonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this investiture 
alone will adequately protect him while employed in the peculiar func- 
tions of his office. 

That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the 
pots; an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, 
planted endwise against the bulwarks, and with a capacious tub be- 
neath it, into which the minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a 
rapt orator’s desk. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicu- 
ous pulpit; intent on Bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbish- 
opric, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer ! 1 

1 Bible leaves ! Bible leaves ! This is the invariable cry from the mates 
to the mincer. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as thin 
slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of boiling out the oil is 
much accelerated, and its quantity considerably increased, besides perhaps 
improving it in quality. 


THE WHITE WHALE 

CHAPTER XCV 


389 


THE TRY-WORKS 

Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distin- 
guished by her try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of the 
most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the 
completed ship. It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were 
transported to her planks. 

The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the 
most roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a peculiar 
strength, fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick 
and mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height. The 
foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly se- 
cured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all sides, 
and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks it is cased with 
wood, and at top completely covered by a large, sloping, battened hatch- 
way. Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, two in number, 
and each of several barrels’ capacity. When not in use, they are kept 
remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished with soapstone and 
sand, till they shine within like silver punchbowls. During the night- 
watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and coil them- 
selves away there for a nap. While employed in polishing them — 
one man in each pot, side by side — many confidential communications 
are carried on, over the iron lips. It is a place also for profound 
mathematical meditation. It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pe- 
quod, with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first 
indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies 
gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from 
any point in precisely the same time. 

Removing the fireboard from the front of the try-works, the bare 
masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of 
the furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted 
with heavy doors of iron. The intense heat of the fire is prevented 
from communicating itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir 
extending under the entire enclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel 
inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept replenished with water &s 


390 


MOBY DICK; OR 

fast as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open 
direct from the rear wall. And here let ns go back for a moment. 

It was about nine o’clock at night that the Pequod’s try-works were 
first started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee 
the business. 

“All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You, cook, fire 
the works.” This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been 
thrusting his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here 
be it said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to 
be fed for a time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a 
means of quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being 
tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, 
still contains considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters 
feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming 
misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns 
by his own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his 
smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, 
but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, 
Hindoo odour about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal 
pyres. 

By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from 
the carcase; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild 
ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the 
fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and 
illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek 
fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned 
to some vengeful deed. So the pith and sulphur-freighted brigs of 
the bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbours, 
with broad sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frig- 
ates, and folded them in conflagrations. 

The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide 
hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes 
of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale ship’s stokers. With huge 
pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding 
pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curl- 
ing, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled 


THE WHITE WHALE 


391 


away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch 
of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. 
Opposite the mouth of the works, on the farther side of the wide 
wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here 
lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red 
heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their 
tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted 
beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth all these 
were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. 
As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of 
terror told in words of mirth ; as their uncivilised laughter forked, up- 
wards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, 
in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge 
pronged forks and dippers ; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, 
and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell 
further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and 
scornfully champed the white hone in her mouth, and viciously spat 
round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with sav- 
ages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into 
that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her 
monomaniac commander’s soul. 

So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently 
guided the way of this fire ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that inter- 
val, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, 
the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes be- 
fore me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat 
kindred visions in my soul, as soon as I began to yield to that unac- 
countable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight 
helm. 

But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable) 
thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was 
horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jawbone tiller 
smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum 
of sails, just beginning to shake in the wind ; I thought my eyes were 
open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and 
mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all 


392 


MOBY DICK; OR 

this, I could see no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed 
but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle 
lamp illumining it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now 
and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the im- 
pression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much 
hound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark, 
bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands 
grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, some- 
how, in some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is the matter 
with me ? thought I. Lo ! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, 
and was fronting the ship’s stern, with my hack to her prow and the 
compass. In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel 
from flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her. How 
glad and how grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination 
of the night,, and the fatal contingency of being brought by the lee ! 

Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream 
with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; ac- 
cept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, 
when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the 
natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in 
the forking flames, the mom will show in far other, at least gentler, 
relief ; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp — all others but 
liars ! 

Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor 
Rome’s accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of 
miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not 
the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two-thirds 
of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy 
than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true — not true, or un- 
developed. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man 
of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is 
the fine-hammered steel of woe. “All is vanity.” All. This wilful 
world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet. But he 
who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, 
and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, 
Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care- 


393 


THE WHITE WHALE 

free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly; 

not that man is fitted to sit down on tombstones, and break the green 
damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon. 

But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way 
of understanding shall remain’’ (i. e. even while living) “in the con- 
gregation of the dead.” Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert 
thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom 
that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Cat- 
skill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest 
gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny 
spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge 
is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain 
eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they 
soar. 


CHAPTER XCYI 

THE LAMP 

Had you descended from the Pequod's try-works to the Pe quod's fore- 
castle, where the off-duty watch were sleeping, for one single moment, 
you would have almost thought you were standing in some illumined 
shrine of canonised kings and counsellors. There they lay in their tri- 
angular oakens vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a score of 
lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes. 

In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of 
queens. To dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in 
darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he 
seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes his berth an 
Aladdin’s lamp, and lays him down in it ; so that in the pitchiest night 
the ship’s black hull still houses an illumination. 

See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of 
lamps — often but old bottles and vials, though — to the copper cooler at 
the try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He 
burns, too, the purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore, 
unvitiated state; a fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astral contriv- 


394 


MOBY DICK; OR 

ances ashore. It is sweet as early grass butter in April. He goes 
and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and genuineness, 
even as the traveller on the prairie hunts up his own supper of game. 


CHAPTER XCYII 

STOWING DOWN AND CLEAEING UP 

Aleeady has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off des- 
cried from the masthead ; how he is chased over the watery moors, and 
slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed alongside 
and beheaded; and how (on the principle which entitled the headsman 
of old to the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his great 
padded surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due 
time, he is condemned to the pots, and how his spermaceti, oil, and 
hone pass unscathed through the fire. But now it remains to conclude 
the last chapter of this part of the description by rehearsing — singing, 
if I may — the romantic proceeding of decanting off his oil into the 
casks and striking them down into the hold, where once again leviathan 
returns to his native profundities, sliding along beneath the surface as 
before ; hut, alas ! never more to rise and blow. 

While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the six- 
barrel casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling this 
way and that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed 
round and headed over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot 
across the slippery deck, like so many land-slides, till at last man- 
handled and stayed in their course ; and all round the hoops, rap, rap, 
go as many hammers as can play upon them, for now, ex officio , every 
sailor is a cooper. 

At length when the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great 
hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open, and 
down go the casks to their final rest in the sea. This done, the hatches 
are replaced, and hermetically closed, like a closet walled up. 

In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable 
incidents in all the business of whaling. One day the planks stream 
with freshets of blood and oil ; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous 


THE WHITE WHALE 


395 


masses of the whale’s head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie 
about, as in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has be- 
sooted all the bulwarks ; the mariners go about suffused with unctuous- 
ness; the entire ship seems a great leviathan himself; while on all 
hands the din is deafening. 

But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears 
in this self-same ship ; and were it not for the tell-tale boats and try- 
works, you would all hut swear you trod some silent merchant vessel, 
with a most scrupulously neat commander. The unmanufactured 
sperm oil possesses a singular cleansing virtue. This is the reason why 
the decks never look so white as just after what they call an affair of 
oil. Besides, from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent 
lye is readily made ; and whenever any adhesiveness from the hack of 
the whale remains clinging to the side, that lye quickly exterminates 
it. Hands go diligently along the bulwarks, and with buckets of 
water and rags restore them to their full tidiness. The soot is brushed 
from the lower rigging. All the numerous implements which have 
been in use are likewise faithfully cleansed and put away. The great 
hatch is scrubbed and placed upon the try-works, completely hiding the 
pots ; every cask is out of sight ; all tackles are coiled in unseen nooks ; 
and when by the combined and simultaneous industry of almost the 
entire ship’s company, the whole of this conscientious duty is at last 
concluded, then the crew themselves proceed to their own ablutions; 
shift themselves from top to toe; and finally issue to the immaculate 
deck, fresh and all aglow. 

How, with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, 
and humorously discourse of parlours, sofas, carpets, and fine cam- 
brics; propose to mat the deck; think of having hangings to the top; 
object not to making tea by moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle. 
To hint to such musked mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber, were 
little short of audacity. They know not the thing you distantly 
allude to. Away, and bring us napkins ! 

But mark: aloft there, at the three mastheads, stand three men in- 
tent on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again 
soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease spot 
somewhere. Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest unin- 


396 


MOBY DICK; OR 

terrupted labours, which know no night; continuing straight through 
for ninety-six hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled 
their wrists with all day rowing on the Line, — they only step to the 
deck to carry vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and 
slash, yea, and in their very sweatings to be smoked and burned anew 
by the combined fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try- 
works; when, on the heel of all this, they have finally bestirred them- 
selves to cleanse the ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it ; many 
is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean 
frocks, are startled by the cry of “There she blows!” and away they 
fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. 
Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life. Lor 
hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s 
vast bulk its small but valuable sperm ; and then, with weary patience, 
cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in 
clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when — There she 
blows ! — the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other 
world, and go through young life’s old routine again. 

Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, 
two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed 
with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage — and, foolish as I am, 
taught thee, a green simple boy, how to Splice a rope ! 


CHAPTER XCVIII 

THE DOUBLOON 

Eke now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter- 
deck, taking regular turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast ; 
but in the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it has not 
been added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged 
in his mood, he was wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand 
there strangely eyeing the particular object before him. When he 
halted before the binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed 
needle in the compass, that glance shot like a javelin with the pointed 
intensity of his purpose ; and when resuming his walk he again paused 


THE WHITE WHALE 397 

before the mainmast, then, as the same riveted glance fastened upon 
the riveted gold coin there, he still wore the same aspect of nailed firm- 
ness, only dashed with a certain wild longing, if not hopefulness. 

But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly 
attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as 
though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in 
some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And 
some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little 
worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher except to sell by 
the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in 
the Milky Way. 

Now this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out 
of the heart of gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden 

sands, the head-waters of many a Pactolus flows. And though now 

nailed amidst all the rustiness of iron bolts and the verdigris of copper 
spikes, yet, untouchable and immaculate to any foulness, it still pre- 
served its Quito glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless' crew 
and every hour passed by ruthless hands, and through the lifelong 
nights shrouded with thick darkness which might cover any pilfering 
approach, nevertheless every sunrise found the doubloon where the 
sunset left it last. For it was set apart and sanctified to one awe- 

striking end ; and however wanton in their sailor ways, one and all, 

the mariners revered it as the white whale’s talisman. Sometimes 
they talked it over in the weary watch by night, wondering whose it was 
to be at last, and whether he would ever live to spend it. 

Now those noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the 
sun and tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; 
sun’s discs and stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich banners wav- 
ing, are in luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold 
seems almost to derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, 
by passing through those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic. 

It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy 
example of these things. On its round border it bore the letters, 
REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin 
came from a country planted in the middle of the world, and beneath 
the great equator, and named after it; and it had been cast midway 


398 


MOBY DICK; OR 

up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned by 
those letters you saw the likeness of three Ande’s summits ; from one 
a flame ; a tower on another ; on the third a crowing cock ; while arch- 
ing over all was a segment of the partitioned zodiac, the signs all 
marked with their usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering 
the equinoctial point at Libra. 

Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was 
now pausing. 

“There’s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, 
and all other grand and lofty things; look here, — three peaks, as 
proud as Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is 
Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, 
is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the 
rounder globe, which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man 
in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, 
small gains, for those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot 
solve itself. Methinks now this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but 
see ! aye, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox ! and but six months 
before he wheeled out of a former equinox at Aries! From storm to 
storm! So be it, then. Born in throes, ’tis fit that man should live 
in pains and die in pangs ! So be it, then ! Here’s stout stuff for woe 
to work on. So be it, then.” 

“Ho fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil’s claws must 
have left their mouldings there since yesterday,” murmured Starbuck 
to himself, leaning against the bulwarks. “The old man seems to 
read Belshazzar’s awful writing. I have never marked the coin in- 
spectingly. He goes below ; let me read. A dark valley between three 
mighty, heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some 
faint, earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round ; 
and over all our gloom, the Sun of Bighteousness still shines a beacon 
and a hope. If we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her 
mouldy soil; but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our glance 
half-way, to cheer. Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at 
midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze 
for him in vain ! This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly 
to me. I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely.” 


THE WHITE WHALE 


399 


“There now’s the old Mogul,” soliloquised Stubb by the try-works, 
“he’s been twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same, and 
both with faces which I should say might be somewhere within nine 
fathoms long. And all from looking at a piece of gold, which did I 
have it now on Negro Hill or in Corlaer’s Hook, I’d not look at it very 
long ere spending it. Humph! in my poor, insignificant opinion, I 
regard this as queer. I have seen doubloons before now in my voyag- 
ings ; your doubloons of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doub- 
loons of Chili, your doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan ; 
with plenty of gold moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half joes, and 
quarter joes. What then should there be in this doubloon of the Equa- 
tor that is so killing wonderful? By Golconda! let me read it once. 
Hallo ! here’s signs and wonders truly ! That, now, is what old Bow- 
ditch in his Epitome calls the zodiac, and what my almanac below calls 
ditto. I’ll get the almanac, and as I have heard devils can be raised 
with Daboll’s arithmetic, I’ll try my hand at raising a meaning out of 
these queer curvicues here with the Massachusetts calendar. Here’s 
the hook. Let’s see now. Signs and wonders; and the sun, he’s 
always among ’em. Hem, hem, hem; here they are — here they go — 
all alive: — Aries, or the Bam; Taurus, or the Bull — and Jimimi! 
here’s Gemini himself, or the Twins. Well; the sun he wheels among 
’em. Aye, here on the coin he’s just crossing the threshold between 
two of twelve sitting-rooms all* in a ring. Book! you lie there; the 
fact is, you books must know your places. You’ll do to give us the bare 
words and facts, hut we come in to supply the thoughts. That’s my 
small experience, so far as the Massachusetts calendar, and Bowditch’s 
navigator, and Daboll’s arithmetic go. Signs and wonders, eh ? Pity 
if there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in wonders! 
There’s a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist — hark! By Jove, I have 
it! Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one 
round chapter; and now I’ll read it off, straight out of the book. 
Come, Almanac! To begin: there’s Aries, or the Bam — lecherous 
dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull — he bumps us the first 
thing; then Gemini, or the Twins — that is, Virtue and Vice; we try 
to reach Virtue, when lo ! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back ; 
and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path — 


400 


MOBY DICK; OR 

he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape, 
and hail Virgo, the Virgin ! that’s our first love ; we marry and think to 
be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the Scales — happiness 
weighed and found wanting; and while we are very sad about that, 
Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us 
in rear ; we are curing the wound, when, whang comes the arrows all 
round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck 
out the shafts, stand aside! here’s the battering-ram, Capricomus, or 
the Goat ; full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed ; when 
Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours out his. whole deluge and drowns 
us; and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep. There’s 
a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through it every 
year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty. Jollily he, aloft 
there, wheels through toil and trouble; and so, alow here, does jolly 
Stubb. Oh, jolly’s the word for aye! Adieu, Doubloon! But 
stop; here comes little King-Post; dodge round the try-works, now, 
and let’s hear what he’ll have to say. There ; he’s before it ; he’ll out 
with something presently. So, so; he’s beginning.” 

“I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever 
raises a certain, whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, what’s 
all this staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars^ that’s true; 
and at two cents the cigar, that’s nine hundred and sixty cigars. I 
won’t smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here’s nine 
hundred and sixty of them ; so here goes Flask aloft to spy ’em out.” 

“Shall I call that wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has 
a foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort of 
wiseish look to it. But, avast; here comes our old Manxman — the 
old hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea. 
He luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other 
side of the mast; why, there’s a horseshoe nailed on that side; and 
now he’s back again ; what does that mean ? Hark ! he’s muttering — 
voice like an old worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen !” 

“If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, 
when the sun stands in some one of these signs. I’ve studied signs, 
and know their marks; they were taught me two score years ago, by 


THE WHITE WHALE 401 

the old witch in Copenhagen. Now, in what sign will the sun then he ? 
The horseshoe sign ; for there it is, right opposite the gold. And what’s 
the horseshoe sign? The lion is the horseshoe sign — the roaring and 
devouring lion. Ship, old ship! my head shakes to think of thee.” 

“There’s another rendering now; hut still one text. All sorts of 
men in one kind of world, you see. Dodge again! here comes Quee- 
queg — all tattooing — looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself. What 
says the Cannibal? As I live he’s comparing notes; looking at his 
thigh bone; thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the 
bowels, I suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon’s Astronomy in the 
back country. And by Jove, he’s found something there in the vicin- 
ity of his thigh — I guess it’s Sagittarius, or the Archer. No: he 
don’t know what to make of the doubloon ; he takes it for an old button 
off some king’s trousers. But, aside again! here comes that ghost- 
devil, Fedallah; tail coiled out of sight as usual, oakum in the toes 
of his pumps as usual. What does he say, with that look of his ? Ah, 
only makes a sign to the sign and bows himself ; there is a sun on the 
coin — fire worshipper, depend upon it. Ho ! more and more. This 
way comes Pip — poor boy! would he had died, or I; he’s half hor- 
rible to me. He too has been watching all of these interpreters — my- 
self included — and look now, he comes to read, with that unearthly 
idiot face. Stand away again and hear him. Hark !” 

“I look, you look, he looks ; we look, ye look, they look.” 

“Upon my soul, he’s been studying Murray’s Grammar ! Improving 
his mind, poor fellow ! But what’s that he says now — hist !” 

“I look, you look, he looks ; we look, ye look, they look.” 

“Why, he’s getting it by heart — hist ! again.” 

“I look, you look, he looks ; we look, ye look, they look.” 

“Well, that’s funny.” 

“And I, you and he ; and we, ye, and they, are all bats ; and I’m a 
crow, especially when I stand a’ top of this pine tree here. Caw! 
caw ! caw ! caw ! caw ! caw ! Ain’t I a crow ? And where’s the scare- 
crow ? There he stands ; two hones stuck into a pair of old trousers, 
and two more poked into the sleeves of an old jacket.” 

“Wonder if he means me ? — complimentary ! : — poor lad ! — I could go 


402 


MOBY DICK; OR 

hang myself. Any way, for the present, I’ll quit Pip’s vicinity. I 
can stand the rest, for they have plain wits; but he’s too crazy-witty 
for my sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering.” 

“Here’s the ship’s navel, this doubloon here, and they are all on fire 
to unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what’s the consequence ? 
Then again, if it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when aught’s nailed 
to the mast it’s a sign that things grow desperate. Ha, ha ! old Ahab ! 
the White Whale; he’ll nail ye! This is a pine tree. My father, in 
old Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver 
ring grown over in it; some old darkey’s wedding-ring. How did it 
get there? And so they’ll say one day, when they come to fish up 
this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters 
for the shabby bark. Oh, the gold! the precious, precious gold! the 
green miser’ll hoard ye soon!” 

CHAPTEE XCIX 

LEG AND ARM 

THE PEQUOD OF NANTUCKET MEETS THE SAMUEL ENDERBY 
OF LONDON 

“Ship, ahoy ! Hast seen the White Whale ?” 

So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colours, 
bearing down under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was 
standing in his hoisted quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to 
the stranger captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat’s 
bow. He was a darkly tanned, burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, 
of sixty or thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung 
round him in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of his 
jacket streamed behind him like the broidered arm of a hussar’s surcoat. 

“Hast seen the White Whale ?” 

“See you this ?” and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden 
it, he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone terminating in a 
wooden head like a mallet. 

“Man my boat!” cried Ahab impetuously, and tossing about the oars 
near him — “Stand by to lower !” 


THE WHITE WHALE 


403 


In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his 
crew were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the 
stranger. But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the ex- 
citement of the moment Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg 
he had never once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, 
and then it was always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical 
contrivance peculiar to the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and 
shipped in any other vessel at a moment’s warning. Now, it is no very 
easy matter for anybody — except those who are almost hourly used to 
it, like whalemen — to clamber up a ship’s side from a boat on the open 
sea ; for the great swells now lift the boat high up towards the bulwarks, 
and then instantaneously drop it half-way down to the kelson. So, de- 
prived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether un- 
supplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly 
reduced to a clumsy landsman again, hopelessly eyeing the uncertain 
changeful height he could hardly hope to attain. 

It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward circum- 
stance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his luckless 
mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab. And in the 
present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of the two offi- 
cers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the perpendicular 
ladder of nailed cleats there, and swimming towards him a pair of 
tastefully ornamented manropes; for at first they did not seem to be- 
think them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to 
use their sea banisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute, 
because the strange captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood, 
cried out : “I see, I see ! — vast heaving there ! Jump, boys, and swing 
over the cutting-tackle.” 

As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day 
or two previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive 
curved blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end. 
This was quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehended it all, 
slid his solitary thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like sitting in 
the fluke of an anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then 
giving the word, held himself fast, and at the same time also helped to 
hoist his own weight, by pulling hand over hand upon one of the run- 


404 


MOBY DICK; OR 

ning parts of the tackle. Soon he was carefully swung inside the high 
bulwarks, and gently landed upon the capstan head. With his ivory 
arm frankly thrust forth in welcome, the other captain advanced, 
and Ahab, putting out his ivory leg, and crossing the ivory arm (like 
two sword-fish blades) cried out in his walrus way, “Aye, aye, hearty ! 
let us shake bones together! — an arm and a leg! — an arm that never 
can shrink d’ye see ; and a leg that never can run. Where didst thou 
see the White Whale ? — how long ago ?” 

“The White Whale,” said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm 
towards the east, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been 
a telescope; “there I saw him, on the Line, last season.” 

“And he took that arm off, did he ?” asked Ahab, now sliding down 
from the capstan, and resting on the Englishman’s shoulder, as he 
did so. 

“Aye, he was the cause of it, at least ; and that leg, too ?” 

“Spin me the yarn,” said Ahab ; “how was it ?” 

“It was the first time in my life I ever cruised on the Line,” began 
the Englishman. “I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time. 
Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my 
boat fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that 
went milling and milling round so, that my boat’s crew could only 
trim dish, by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale. Presently 
up breaches from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale, with 
a milky-white head and hump, all crow’s feet and wrinkles.” 

“It was he, it was he!” cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his sus- 
pended breath. 

“And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin.” 

“Aye, aye — they were mine — my irons,” cried Ahab exultingly — 
“but on !” 

“Give me a chance, then,” said the Englishman, good-humouredly. 
“Well, this old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, 
runs all afoam into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast- 
line.” 

“Aye, I see ! — wanted to part it ; free the fast-fish — an old trick — I 
know him.” 

“How it was exactly,” continued the one-armed commander, “I do 


THE WHITE WHALE 405 

not know ; but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there 
somehow; but we didn’t know it then; so that when we afterwards 
pulled on the line, bounce we came plump on to his hump ! instead of 
the other whale’s; that went off to windward, all fluking. Seeing how 
matters stood, and what a noble great whale it was — the noblest and 
biggest I ever saw, sir, in my life — I resolved to capture him, spite of 
the boiling rage he seemed to be in. And thinking the haphazard line 
would get loose, or the tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I 
have a devil of a boat’s crew for a pull on a whale-line) ; seeing all this, 
I say, I jumped into my first mate’s boat — Mr. Mounttop’s here (by 
the way, captain — Mounttop; Mounttop — the captain; — as I was say- 
ing, I jumped into Mounttop’s boat, which, d’ye see, was gunwale and 
gunwale with mine then; and snatching the first harpoon, let this old 
great-grandfather have it. But, Lord look you,- sir — hearts and souls 
alive, man — the next instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat — both 
eyes out — all befogged and bedeadened with black foam — the whale’s 
tail looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a 
marble steeple. No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at 
midday, with a blinding sun,, all crown-jewels ; as I was groping, I 
say, after the second iron to toss it overboard — down comes the tail 
like a Lima Tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half in 
splinters; and, flukes first, the white hump backed through the wreck, 
as though it was all chips. We all struck out. To escape his terrible 
Sailings, I seized hold of my harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a 
moment clung to that like a sucking fish. But a combing sea dashed 
me off, and at the same instant, the fish, taking one good dart forwards, 
went down like a flash ; and the barb of that cursed second iron towing 
along near me caught me here” (clapping his hand just below his 
shoulder) ; “yes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to 
Hell’s flames, I was thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the 
good God, the barb ripped its way along the flesh — clear along the 
whole length of my arm — came out nigh my wrist, and up I floated ; — 
and that gentleman there will tell you the rest (by the way, captain — 
Dr. Bunger, ship’s surgeon: Bunger, my lad — the captain). Now, 
Bunger, boy, spin your part of the yarn.” 

The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out ? had been 


406 


MOBY DICK; OR 

all the time standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to denote 
his gentlemanly rank on board. His face was an exceedingly round 
but sober one; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, 
and patched trousers; and had thus far been dividing his attention 
between a marling-spike he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the 
other, occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the 
two crippled captains. But, at the superior’s introduction of him to 
Ahab, he politely bowed and straightway went on to do his captain’s 
bidding. 

“It was a shocking bad wound,” began the whale surgeon; “and, 
taking my advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy ” 

“Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship,” interrupted the one- 
armed captain, addressing Ahab; “go on, boy.” 

“Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing 
hot weather there on the Line. But it was no use — I did all I could ; 
sat up with him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of 
diet ” 

“Oh, very severe!” chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly 
altering his voice, “drinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till 
he couldn’t see to put on the bandages; and sending me to bed, half 
seas over, about three o’clock in the morning. Oh, ye stars! he sat 
up with me indeed, and was very severe in my diet. Oh! a great 
watcher, and very dietetically severe, is Dr. Bunger. (Bunger, you 
dog, laugh out! why don’t ye? You know you’re a precious jolly 
rascal.) But, heave ahead, boy, I’d rather be killed by you than kept 
alive by any other man.” 

“My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir” — 
said the imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab — 
“is apt to be facetious at times ; he spins us many clever things of that 
sort. But I may as well say — en passant , as the French remark — 
that I myself — that is to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend 
clergy — am a strict total abstinence man ; I never drink ” 

“Water!” cried the captain; “he never drinks it; it’s a sort of fits 
to him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on — go 
on with the arm story.” 

“Yes, I may as well,” said the surgeon coolly. “I was about ob- 


THE WHITE WHALE 


407 


serving, sir, before Captain Boomer’s facetious interruption, that spite 
of my best and severest endeavours, the wound kept getting worse and 
worse; the truth was, sir, it was as ugly a gaping wound as surgeon 
ever saw; more than two feet and several inches long. I measured it 
with the lead-line. In short, it grew black; I knew what was threat- 
ened, and off it came. But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm 
there ; that thing is against all rule” — pointing at it with the marling- 
spike — “that is the captain’s work, not mine ; he ordered the carpenter 
to make it; he had that club-hammer there put to the end, to knock 
some one’s brains out with, I suppose, as he tried mine once. He 
flies into diabolical passions sometimes. Do ye see this dent, sir” — 
removing his hat, and brushing aside his hair, and exposing a bowl- 
like cavity in his skull, but which bore not the slightest scarry trace, 
or any token of ever having been a wound — “well, the captain there 
will tell you how that came here ; he knows.” 

“Ho, I don’t,” said the captain, “but his mother did; he was born 
with it. Oh, you solemn rogue, you — you Bunger! was there ever 
such another Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die, 
you ought to die in pickle, you dog ; you should be preserved to future 
ages, you rascal.” 

“What became of the White Whale ?” now cried Ahab, who thus far 
had been impatiently listening to this by-play between the two Eng- 
lishmen. 

“Oh,” cried the one-armed captain, “oh, yes! Well; after he 
sounded, we didn’t see him again for some time; in fact, as I before 
hinted, I didn’t then know what whale it was that had served me such 
a trick, till some time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we 
heard about Moby Dick — as some call him — and then I knew it was 
he.” 

“Didst thou cross his wake again?” 

“Twice.” 

“But could not fasten ?” 

“Didn’t want to try to: ain’t one limb enough? What should I do 
without this other arm? And I’m thinking Moby Dick doesn’t bite 
so much as he swallows.” 

“Well, then,” interrupted Bunger, “give him your left arm for bait 


408 


MOBY DICK; OR 

to get the right. Do you know, gentlemen” — very gravely and math- 
ematically bowing to each captain in succession — “do you know, gentle- 
men, that the digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably con- 
structed by Divine Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to 
completely digest even a man’s arm ? And he knows it too. So that 
what you take for the White Whale’s malice is only his awkwardness. 
For he never means to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify 
by feints. But sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow, formerly 
a patient of mine in Ceylon, that making believe swallow jack-knives, 
once upon a time let one drop into him in good earnest, and there it 
stayed for a twelvemonth or more ; when I gave him an emetic, and he 
heaved it up in small tacks, d’ye see. No possible way for him to 
digest that jack-knife, and fully incorporate it into his general bodily 
system. Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick enough about it, and 
have a mind to pawn one arm for the sake of the privilege of giving 
decent burial to the other, why in that case the arm is yours; only let 
the whale have another chance at you shortly, that’s all.” 

“No, thank ye, Bunger,” said the English captain; “he’s welcome 
to the arm he has, since I can’t help it, and didn’t know him then, but 
not to another one. No more White Whales for me; I’ve lowered 
for him once, and that has satisfied me. There would be great glory 
in killing him, I know that ; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm 
in him, but, hark ye, he’s best let alone ; don’t you think so, captain ?” 
— glancing at the ivory leg. 

“He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let 
alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all 
a magnet. How long since thou saw’st him last? Which way head- 
ing ?” 

“Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend’s,” cried Bunger stoopingly 
walking around Ahab, and like a dog strangely snuffing; “this man’s 
blood — bring the thermometer! — it’s at the boiling point! — his pulse 
makes these planks beat ! — sir !” — taking a lancet from his pocket, and 
drawing near to Ahab’s arm. 

“Avast!” roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks — “Man 
the boat! Which way heading?” 

“Good God!” cried the English captain, to whom the question was 


409 


THE WHITE WHALE 

put. “What’s the matter? He was leading east, I think — Is your 
captain crazy ?” whispering Fedallah. 

But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks to 
take the boat’s steering-oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle 
towards him, commanded the ship’s sailors to stand by to lower. 

In a moment he was standing in the boat’s stern, and the Manilla 
men were springing to their oars. In vain the English captain hailed 
him. With back to the stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his 
own, Ahab stood upright till alongside of the Pequod. 


CHAPTER C 

THE DECANTER 

Ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that she 
hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby, 
merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling house of 
Enderby & Sons ; a house which in my poor whaleman’s opinion, comes 
not far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in 
point of real historical interest. How long, prior to the year of our 
Lord 1775, this great whaling house was in existence, my numerous 
fish documents do not make plain; but in that year (1775) it fitted out 
the first English ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm Whale; 
though for some score of years previous (ever since 1726) our valiant 
Coflins and Maceys of Nantucket and the Vineyard had in large fleets 
pursued that Leviathan, but only in the North and South Atlantic: 
not elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here, that the Nantucketers 
were the first among mankind to harpoon with civilised steel the great 
Sperm Whale; and that for half a century they were the only people 
of the whole globe who so harpooned him. 

In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose, 
and at the sole charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape 
Horn, and was the first among the nations to lower a whale boat of 
any sort in the great South Sea. The voyage was a skilful and lucky 
one; and returning to her berth with her hold full of the precious 
sperm, the Amelia's example was soon followed by other ships, English 


410 


MOBY DICK; OR 

and American, and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific 
were thrown open. But not content with this good deed, the inde- 
fatigable house again bestirred itself: Samuel and all his sons how 
many, their mother only knows — and under their immediate auspices, 
and partly, I think, at their expense, the British Government was in- 
duced to send the sloop-of-war Rattler on a whaling voyage of dis- 
covery into the South Sea. Commanded by a naval post-captain the 
Rattler made a rattling voyage of it, and did some service ; how much 
does not appear. But this is not all. In 1819, the same house fitted 
out a discovery whale ship of their own, to go on a testing cruise to 
the remote waters of Japan. That ship — well called the Syren — 
made a noble experimental cruise; and it was thus that the great 
Japanese Whaling-Ground first became generally known. The Syren 
in this famous voyage was commanded by a Captain Coffin, a Nan- 
tucketer. 

All honour to the Enderbys, therefore, whose house, I think, exists 
to the present day ; though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago 
have slipped his cable for the great South Sea of the other world. 

The ship named after him was worthy of the honour, being a very 
fast sailor and a noble craft every way. I boarded her once at mid- 
night somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down 
in the forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they were all trumps 
— every soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly death. And 
that fine gam I had — long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks 
with his ivory heel — it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality 
of that ship ; and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember 
me, if I ever lose sight of it. Flip ? Did I say we had flip ? Yes, 
and we flipped it at the rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the 
squall came (for it’s squally off there by Patagonia), and all hands — 
visitors and all — were called to reef topsails, we were so top-heavy that 
we had to swing each other aloft in bow-lines ; and we ignorantly furled 
the skirts of our jackets into the sails, so that we hung there, reefed 
fast in the howling gale, a warning example to all drunken tars. How- 
ever the masts did not go overboard; and by and by we scrambled 
down, so sober, that we had to pass the flip again, though the savage 


411 


THE WHITE WHALE 

salt spray bursting down the forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted 
and pickled it to my taste. 

The beef was fine — tough, but with body in it. They said it was 
bull-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for 
certain, how that was. They had dumplings too ; small, but substantial, 
symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I fancied that 
you could feel them, and roll them about in you after they were swal- 
lowed. If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their pitching 
out of you like billiard-balls. The bread — but that couldn’t be helped ; 
besides, it was an anti-scorbutic ; in short, the bread contained the only 
fresh fare they had. But the forecastle was not very light, and it was 
very easy to step over into a dark corner when you ate it. But all in all, 
taking her from truck to helm, considering the dimensions of the cook’s 
boilers, including his own live parchment boilers; fore and aft, I say, 
the Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship; of good fare and plenty; fine 
flip and strong; crack fellows all, and capital from boot heels to hat- 
band. 

But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other 
English whalers I know of — not all though — were such famous, hospit- 
able ships ; that passed round the beef, and the bread, and the can, and 
the joke; and were not soon weary of eating, and drinking, and laugh- 
ing? I will tell you. The abounding good cheer of these English 
whalers is matter for historical research. Nor have I been at all 
sparing of historical whale research, when it has seemed needed. 

The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders, 
Zealanders and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still ex- 
tant in the fishery ; and what is yet more, their fat old fashions, touch- 
ing plenty to eat and drink. For, as a general thing, the English 
merchant ship scrimps her crew; but not so the English whaler. 
Hence, in the English, this thing of whaling good cheer is not normal 
and natural, but incidental and particular; and, therefore, must have 
some special origin, which is here pointed out, and will be still further 
elucidated. 

During my researches in the Levia.thanie histories, I stumbled upon 
an ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I 


412 


MOBY DICK; OR 

knew must be about whalers. The title was, Dan Coopman, where- 
fore I concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some 
Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its 
cooper. I was reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it was the 
production of one “Fitz Swackhammer.” But my friend Dr. Snod- 
head, a very learned man, professor of Low Dutch and High German 
in the college of Santa Claus and St. Pott’s, to whom I handed the 
work for translation, giving him a box of sperm candles for his trouble 
— this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he spied the book, assured me 
that “Dan Coopman” did not mean “The Cooper,” but “The Mer- 
chant.” In short, this ancient and learned Low Dutch book treated 
of the commerce of Holland; and, among other subjects, contained a 
very interesting account of its whale fishery. And in this chapter 
it was, headed “Smeer,” or “Fat,” that I found a long detailed list 
of the outfits for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whale- 
men; from which list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead, I transcribed 
the following : 

400.000 lbs. of beef. 

60.000 lbs. Friesland pork. 

150.000 lbs. of stock fish. 

550.000 lbs. of biscuit. 

12.000 lbs. of soft bread. 

2,800 firkins of butter. 

20.000 lbs. Texel and Leyden cheese. 

144.000 lbs. cheese (probably an inferior article). 

550 ankers of Geneva. 

10,800 barrels of beer. 

Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in 
the present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes, 
barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer. 

At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all this 
beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were in- 
cidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic ap- 
plication; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my 
own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc., consumed by 


413 


THE WHITE WHALE 

every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen 
whale fishery. In the first place, the amount of butter, and Texel and 
Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute it, though, to 
their naturally unctuous natures, being rendered still more unctuous 
by the nature of their vocation, and especially by their pursuing their 
game in those frigid Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux 
country where the convivial natives pledge each other in bumpers of 
train oil. 

The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. How, as 
those polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of 
that climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen, 
including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not 
much exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their 
fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I 
say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks’ 
allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers of gin. 
How, whether these gin and beer harpooneers — so fuddled as one might 
fancy them to have been — were the right sort of men to stand up in a 
boat’s head, and take good aim at flying whales ; this would seem some- 
what improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and hit them too. But 
this was very far Horth, be it remembered, where beer agrees well with 
the constitution. Upon the Equator, in our southern fishery, beer 
would be apt to make the harpooneer sleepy at the masthead and boozy 
in his boat; and grievous loss might ensue to Hantucket and Hew 
Bedford. 

But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch 
whalers of two or three centuries ago were high livers; and that the 
English whalers have not neglected so excellent an example. For, say 
they, when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better 
out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least. And this 
empties the decanter. 


414 


MOBY DICK; OR 

CHAPTER Cl 


A BOWER IN THE ARSAQIDES 

Hitherto, in descriptive treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly 
dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect ; or separately and in detail 
upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and 
thorough sweeping comprehension of him, it behoves me now to un- 
button him still further, and untrussing the points of his hose, un- 
buckling his garters, and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the 
joints of his innermost hones, set him before you in his ultimatum; 
that is to say, in his unconditional skeleton. 

But how now, Ishmael ? How is it, that you, a mere oarsmen in the 
fishery, pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the 
whale? Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver lec- 
tures on the anatomy of the Cetacea ; and by help of the windlass, hold 
up a specimen rib for exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can 
you land a full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook 
dishes a roast-pig ? Surely not. A veritable witness have you hitherto 
been, Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah 
alone; the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the 
rafters, ridgepole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the frame- 
work of leviathan ; and belike of the tallow-vats, dairyrooms, butteries, 
and cheeseries in his bowels. 

I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far 
beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed 
with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged 
to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for 
his poke or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and 
for the heads of the lances. Think you I let that chance go, without 
using my boat hatchet, and jack-knife, and breaking the seal and 
reading all the contents of that young cub ? 

And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan 
in their gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge 
I am indebted to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one 
of the Arsacides. Eor being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to 
the trading-ship Bey of Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the Ar- 


415 


THE WHITE WHALE 

sacidean holidays with the Lord of Tranque, at his retired palm villa 
at Pupella ; a seaside glen not very far distant from what our sailors 
called Bamboo-Town, his capital. 

Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being 
gifted with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought 
together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious of his 
people could invent ; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices, chis- 
elled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes ; and all these 
distributed among whatever natural wonders, the wonder-freighted, 
tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores. 

Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an 
unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his 
head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings 
seemed his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been stripped 
of its fathom-deep enfoldings, and the hones become dust dry in the 
sun, then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, 
where a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it. 

The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved with 
Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics ; in the skull, the priests kept 
up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again 
sent forth its vapoury spout; while, suspended from a bough, the ter- 
rific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword 
that so affrighted Damocles. 

It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy 
Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the 
industrious earth beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous carpet 
on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and 
the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden 
branches ; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses ; the message-carrying 
air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the 
leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied 
verdure. Oh, busy weaver ! unseen weaver ! — pause ! — one word ! — 
whither flows the fabric ? what palace may it deck ? wherefore all these 
ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver! — stay thy hand! — but one 
single word with thee! Ha y — the shuttle flies — the figures float 
from forth the loom ; the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides 


416 


MOBY DICK; OR 

away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deaf- 
ened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we too, 
who look on the loom are deafened ; and only when we escape it shall 
we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in 
all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among 
the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the 
walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villainies 
been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din 
of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar. 

Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, 
the great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging — a gigantic idler! 
Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and 
hummed around him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver ; him- 
self all woven over with the vines; every month assuming greener, 
fresher verdure; but himself a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death 
trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him 
curly-headed glories. 

Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and 
saw the skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from where 
the real jet had issued, I marvelled that the king should regard a chapel 
as an object of vertu. He laughed. But more I marvelled that the 
priests should swear that smoky jet of his was genuine. To and fro 
I paced before this skeleton — brushed the vines aside — broke 
through the ribs — and with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered, 
eddied long amid its many winding, shaded colonnades and arbours. 
But soon my line was out; and following it back, I emerged from the 
opening where I entered. I saw no living thing within; naught was 
there but bones. 

Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the 
skeleton. From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me 
taking the altitude of the final rib. “How now!” they shouted; 
“Dar’st thou measure this our god ! That’s for us.” “Aye, priests — 
well, how long do you make him, then ?” But hereupon a fierce con- 
test rose among them, concerning feet and inches; they cracked each 
other’s sconces with their yard-sticks — the great skull echoed — and 
seizing that lucky chance, I quickly concluded my own admeasurements. 


THE WHITE WHALE 


417 


These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first, 
be it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied 
measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you 
can refer to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, 
they tell me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that coun- 
try, where they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. 
Likewise, I have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in Hew 
Hampshire, they have what the proprietors call “the only perfect speci- 
men of a Greenland or Right Whale in the United States.” Moreover, 
at a place in Yorkshire, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir 
Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, 
but of moderate size, by no means of the full-grown magnitude of my 
friend King Tranquo’s. 

In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons be- 
longed, were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar 
grounds. King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir 
Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those parts. Sir 
Clifford’s whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a great 
chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony cavities — 
spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan — and swing all day upon his 
lower jaw. Locks are to he put upon some of his trap-doors and shut- 
ters; and a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of 
keys at his side. 

The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied 
verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my 
wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of pre- 
serving spch valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, 
and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a 
poem I was then composing — at least, what untattooed parts might re- 
main — I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, 
should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale. 


418 MOBY DICK; OR 

CHAPTER CII 

MEASUREMENT OF TIIE WHALERS SKELETON 

In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain state- 
ment, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we 
are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here. 

According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly 
base upon Captain Seoresby’s estimate, of seventy tons for the largest 
size Greenland whale of sixty feet in length ; according to my careful 
calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between 
eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty 
feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least 
ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would con- 
siderably out weigh the combined population of a whole village of one 
thousand one hundred inhabitants. 

Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should he put to 
this leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman’s imagination? 

Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout- 
hole, jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall 
now simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of 
his unobstructed bones. But as the colossal skull embraces so very 
large a proportion of the entire extent of the skeleton; as it is by far 
the most complicated part ; and as nothing is to be repeated concerning 
it in this chapter, you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under 
your arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete notion 
of the general structure we are about to view. 

In length, the Sperm Whale’s skeleton at Tranque measured seventy- 
two feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must 
have been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about 
one fifth in length compared with the living body. Of this seventy-two 
feet, his skull and jaw comprised some twenty feet; leaving some fifty 
feet of plain back-bone. Attached to this back-bone, for something 
less than a third of its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs 
which once enclosed his vitals. 

To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine, 
extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled 


419 


THE WHITE WHALE 

the embryo hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only 
some twenty of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is other- 
wise, for the time, but a long, disconnected timber. 

The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, 
was nearly six feet long ; the second, third, and fourth were each suc- 
cessively longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one of the 
middle ribs, which measured eight feet and some inches. From that 
part, the remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only spanned 
five feet and some inches. In general thickness they all bore a seemly 
correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the most arched. 
In some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay 
foot-path bridges over small streams. 

In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the 
circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of 
the whale is by no means the mould of this invested form. The 
largest of the Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones, occupied that 
part of the fish which, in life, is greatest in depth. How, the great- 
est depth of the invested body of this particular whale must have 
been at least sixteen feet; whereas the corresponding rib measured but 
little more than eight feet. So that this rib only conveyed half of the 
true notion of the living magnitude of that part. Besides, for some 
way, where I now saw but a naked spine, all that had been once 
wrapped round with tons of added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and 
bowels. Still more, for the ample fins, I here saw but a few disordered 
joints; and in place of the weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, 
an utter blank ! 

How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man 
to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring 
over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. Ho. 
Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddvings 
of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the 
fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out. 

But the spine. For that, the best way we can consider it is, with 
a crane, to pile its bones high up on end. Ho speedy enterprise. 
But now it’s done, it looks much like Pompey’s Pillar. 

There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are 
not locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks 


420 


MOBY DICK; OR 

on a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The 
largest, a middle one, is in width something less than three feet, and 
in depth more than four. The smallest, where the spine tapers away 
into the tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a 
white billiard-ball. I was told that there were still smaller ones, hut 
they had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest’s children, 
who had stolen them to play marbles with. Thus we see how that the 
spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple 
child’s play. 

CHAPTEE CIII 

THE FOSSIL WHALE 

From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme 
whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, 
you could not compress him. By good rights he should only be treated 
of in imperial folio. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle 
to tail, and the yards he measured about the waist ; only think of the 
gigantic involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like great 
cables and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlopdeck of a line- 
of-battle ship. 

Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behoves 
me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not 
overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him 
out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described 
him in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it 
now remains to magnify him in an archseological, fossiliferous, and 
antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature than the 
Leviathan — to an ant or a flea — such portly terms might justly be 
deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the 
text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under 
the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that 
whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these 
dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, 
expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicog- 


421 


THE WHITE WHALE 

rapher’s uncommon personal bulk more iitted him to compile a lexi- 
con to be used by a whale author like me. 

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, 
though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing 
of this Leviathan ? Unconsciously my chirography expands into pla- 
card capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater 
for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of 
penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make 
me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to 
include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of 
whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all 
the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole 
universe. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and 
liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, 
you must choose a mighty theme. Ho great and enduring volume 
can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it. 

Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my 
credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time 
I have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals 
and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by 
way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the 
earlier geological strata there are found fossils of monsters now almost 
completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are called 
the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate inter- 
cepted links, between the antechronical creatures, and those whose re- 
mote posterity are said to have entered the Ark. All the Fossil Whales 
hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last 
preceding the superficial formations. And though none of them pre- 
cisely answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet 
sufficiently akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking 
rank as Cetacean fossils. 

Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their 
bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, 
been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in Eng- 
land, in Scotland, and in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Ala- 
bama. Among the more curious of such remains is part of a skull. 


422 


MOBY DICK; OR 

which in the year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, 
a short street opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries ; 
and bones disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in 
Napoleon’s time. Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have be- 
longed to some utterly unknown Leviathanic species. 

But by far the most wonderful of all cetacean relics was the almost 
complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, 
on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken 
credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the 
fallen angels. The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and 
bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen 
bones of it being taken across the sea to Owen, the English anatomist, 
it turned out that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a de- 
parted species — a significant illustration of the fact, again and again 
repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but 
little clue to the shape of his fully invested body. So Owen rechrist- 
ened the monster Zeuglodon — ; and in his paper read before the Lon- 
don Geological Society, pronounced it, in substance, one of the most ex- 
traordinary creatures which the mutations of the globe have blotted out 
of existence. 

When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, 
jaws, rigs, and vertebrae, all characterised by partial resemblances to 
the existing breeds of sea-monsters ; but at the same time bearing on the 
other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antechronical Levia- 
thans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that 
wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun ; for time be- 
gan with man. Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain 
dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities ; when wedged bas- 
tions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics ; and in all the 
25,000 miles of this world’s circumference, not an inhabitable hand’s 
breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the whale’s; 
and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the 
Andes and the Himalayas. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan ? 
Ahab’s harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaohs. Methuselah 
seems a school-boy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am 
horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeak- 


THE WHITE WHALE 


423 


able terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must 
need exist after all human ages are over. 

But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the 
stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his 
ancient bust ; but upon Egyptian tables, whose antiquity seems to claim 
for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable 
print of his fin. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah, 
some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling 
a sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, 
and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe 
of the moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore ; 
was there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon 
was cradled. 

Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiq- 
uity of the whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian reality, as set down 
by the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller. 

“Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Bafters and 
Beams of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a mon- 
strous size are oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The Common 
People imagine, that by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the 
temple, no Whale can pass it without immediate death. But the 
truth of the Matter is, that on either side of the Temple, there are 
Bocks that shoot two Miles into the Sea, and wound the Whales when 
they light upon ’em. They keep a Whale’s Bib of an incredible 
length for a Miracle, which lying upon the Ground with its convex 
part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which cannot be reached 
by a Man upon a Camel’s Back. This Bib is said to have layn there 
a hundred Years before I saw it. Their Historians affirm, that a 
Prophet who prophesy’d of Mahomet, came from this Temple, and 
some do not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth 
by the Whale at the Base of the Temple.” 

In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be 
a Nantucketer, and a Whaleman, you will silently worship there. 


424 MOBY DICK; OR 

CHAPTER CIV 

DOES THE WHALERS MAGNITUDE DIMINISH ? WILL HE PERISH ? 

Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us 
from the head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, 
whether, in the long course of his generations, he has not degenerated 
from the original bulk of his sires. 

But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the 
present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are 
found in the Tertiary system (embracing distinct geological period 
prior to man), but of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those 
belonging to its latter formation exceed in size those of its earlier ones. 

Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the 
Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less than 
seventy feet in length in the skeleton. Whereas, we have already seen, 
that the tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a 
large-sized modern whale. And I have heard, on whalemen’s author- 
ity, that Sperm Whales have been captured near a hundred feet long 
at the time of capture. 

But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are 
an advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods : 
may it not he, that since Adam’s time they have degenerated? 

Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts 
of such gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally. 
For Pliny tells us of whales that embraced acres of living hulk, and 
Aldrovandus of others which measured eight hundred feet in length — 
Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales! And even in the days 
of Banks and Solander, Cook’s naturalists, we find a Danish member 
of the Academy of Sciences setting down certain Iceland Whales 
(Reydon-siskur, or Wrinkled Bellies) at one hundred and twenty 
yards; that is, three hundred and sixty feet. And Lacepede, the 
French naturalist, in his elaborate history of whales, in the very 
beginning of his work (page 3), sets down the Right Whale at one 
hundred metres, three hundred and twenty-eight feet. And this work 
was published so late as A.D. 1825. 

But will any whaleman believe these stories ? Ho. The Whale of 


425 


THE WHITE WHALE 

to-day is as big as his ancestors in Pliny’s time. And if ever I go 
where Pliny is, I, a whaleman (more than he was), will make bold 
to tell him so. Because I cannot understand how it is, that while the 
-Egypti an mummies that were buried thousands of years before even 
Pliny was born, do not measure so much in their coffins as a modern 
Kentuckian in his socks; and while the cattle and other animals 
sculptured on the oldest Egyptian and Nineveh tablets, by the relative 
proportions in which they are drawn just as plainly prove that the 
high-bred stall-fed, prize cattle of Smithfield, not only equal, but far 
exceed in magnitude the fattest of Pharaoh’s fat kine; in the face of 
all this, I will not admit that of all animals the whale alone should 
have degenerated. 

But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more 
recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient 
lookouts at the mastheads of the whale ships, now penetrating even 
through Behring’s Straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and 
lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted 
along all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can 
long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he 
must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, 
like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the 
final puff. 

Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of 
buffalo, which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands 
the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and 
scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous 
river capitals, where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar 
an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem 
furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy 
extinction. 

But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short 
a period ago — not a good lifetime — the census of the buffalo in Illinois 
exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present 
day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region ; and though 
the cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man ; yet the 
far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglor- 
ious an end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the 


426 MOBY DICK; OR 

Sperm Whale for forty-eight months think they have done extremely 
well, and thank God, if at last they carry home the oil of forty fish. 
Whereas, in the days of the old Canadian and Indian hunters and 
trappers of the West, when the far west (in whose sunset suns still 
rise) was a wilderness and a virgin, the same number of moccasined 
men, for the same number of months, mounted on horses instead of 
sailing in ships, would have slain not forty, hut forty thousand and 
more buffaloes; a fact that, if need were, could be statistically stated. 

Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the 
gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former 
years (the latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in 
small pods were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in con- 
sequence, the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more 
remunerative. Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales, 
influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in immense 
caravans, so that to a large degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and 
pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into vast but widely 
separated, unfrequent armies. That is all. And equally fallacious 
seems the conceit, that because the so-called whale-bone whales no 
longer haunt many grounds in former years abounding with them, 
hence that species also is declining. For they are only being driven 
from promontory to cape ; and if one coast is no longer enlivened with 
their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been very 
recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle. 

Furthermore : concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have 
two firm fortresses, which, in all human probability, will for ever re- 
main impregnable. And as upon the invasion of their valleys, the 
frosty Swiss have retreated to their mountains; so, hunted from the 
savannas and glades of the middle seas, the whale-bone whales can at 
last resort to their Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate 
glassy barriers and walls there, come up among icy fields and floes ; and 
in a charmed circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit 
from man. 

But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for 
one cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that 
this positive havoc has already very seriously diminished their battal- 
ions. But though for some time past a number of these whales, not 


427 


THE WHITE WHALE 

less than 13,000, have been -annually slain on the nor* -west coast by 
the Americans alone ; yet there are considerations which render even 
this circumstance of little or no account as an opposing argument in 
this matter. 

Natural as it is to he somewhat incredulous concerning the pop- 
ulousness of the more enormous creatures of the globe, yet what shall 
we say to Harto, the historian of Goa, when he tells us that at one 
hunting the King of Siam took 4000 elephants; that in those regions 
elephants are numerous as droves of cattle in the temperate climes. 
And there seems no reason to doubt that if these elephants, which have 
now been hunted for thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by 
Hannibal, and by all the successive monarchs of the East — if they still 
survive there in great numbers, much more may the great whale out- 
last all hunting, since he has a pasture to expatiate in, which is pre- 
cisely twice as large as all Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, 
New Holland, and all the Isles of the sea combined. 

Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longev- 
ity of whales, their probably attaining the age of a century and more, 
therefore at any one period of time, several distinct adult generations 
must be contemporary. And what that is, we may soon gain some 
idea of, by imagining all the graveyards, cemeteries, and family vaults 
of creation yielding up the live bodies of all the men, women, and 
children who were alive seventy-five years ago; and adding this count- 
less host to the present human population of the globe. 

Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in 
his species, however perishable in his individuality. He swam the 
seas before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site 
of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In Noah’s 
flood he despised Noah’s Ark; and if ever the world is to be again 
flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale 
will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial 
flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies. 


428 


MOBY DICK; OR 

CHAPTER CV 
ahab's leg 


The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the 
Samuel Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small 
violence to his own person. He had alighted with such energy 
upon a thwart of his boat that his ivory leg had received a half-splinter- 
ing shock. And when after gaining his own deck, and his own pivot- 
hole there, he so vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command 
to the steersman (it was, as ever, something about his not steering in- 
flexibly enough) ; then, the already shaken ivory received such an ad- 
ditional twist and wrench that though it still remained entire, and 
to all appearances lusty, yet Ahab did not deem it entirely trust- 
worthy. 

And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his 
pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the 
condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood. Eor it 
had not been very long prior to the Pequod’s sailing from Han tucket, 
that he had been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and 
insensible; by some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable, unimagi- 
nable casualty, his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that 
it had stakewise smitten, and all but pierced his groin ; nor was it with- 
out extreme difficulty that the agonising wound was entirely cured. 

Hor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that 
all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue 
of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most 
poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as 
the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all 
miserable events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, 
thought Ahab ; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further 
than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. Eor, not to hint of this: that 
it is an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some 
natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the 
other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childless- 
ness of all hell’s despair ; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still 
fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs 


429 


THE WHITE WHALE 

beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an in- 
equality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while 
even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying 
pettiness lurking in them, but at bottom, all heart-woes, a mystic 
significance, and, in some men, an archangel grandeur; so do their 
diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the 
genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the 
sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that in the face of all the 
glad, haymaking suns, and soft cymballing, round harvest moons, we 
must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever 
glad. The ineffaceable, sad birthmark in the brow of man, is but the 
stamp of sorrow in the singers. 

Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might 
more properly, in set way, have been disclosed before. With many 
other particulars concerning Ahab, always had it remained a mystery 
to some, why it was, that for a certain period both before and after 
the sailing of the Pequod , he had hidden himself away with such 
Grand-Lama-like exclusiveness; and, for that one interval, sought 
speechless refuge, as it were, among the marble senate of the dead. 
Captain Peleg’s bruited reason for this thing appeared by no means 
adequate; though, indeed, as touching all Ahab’s deeper part, every 
revelation partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory 
light. But in the end it all came out; this one matter did, at least. 
That direful mishap was at the bottom of his temporary recluseness. 
And not only this, but to that ever-contracting, dropping circle ashore, 
who, for any reason, possessed the privilege of a less banned approach 
to him ; to that timid circle the above hinted casualty — remaining, as it 
did, moodily unaccounted for by Ahab — invested itself with terrors, 
not entirely underived from the land of spirits and of wails. So that, 
through their zeal for him, they had all conspired, so far as in them lay, 
to muffle up the knowledge of this thing from others ; and hence it was, 
that not till a considerable interval had elapsed, did it transpire upon 
the Pequod* s decks. 

But be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the 
air, or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not 
with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took plain, 
practical procedures ; — he called the carpenter. 


430 


MOBY DICK; OR 

And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him with- 
out delay set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him 
supplied with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) 
which had thus far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that a 
careful selection of the stoutest, clearest-grained stuff might be secured. 
This done, the carpenter received orders to have the leg completed 
that night; and to provide all the fittings for it, independent of those 
pertaining to the distrusted one in use. Moreover the ship’s forge was 
ordered to be hoisted out of its temporary idleness in the hold; and, 
to accelerate the affair, the blacksmith was commanded to proceed at 
once to the forging of whatever iron contrivances might be needed. 


CHAPTER CVI 

THE CARPENTER 

Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high 
abstracted man alone, and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. 
But from the same point take mankind in mass, and for the most 
part they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and 
hereditary. But most humble though he was, and far from furnish- 
ing an example of the high, humane abstraction, the Pequod’s carpen- 
ter was no duplicate; hence, he now comes in person on this stage. 

Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belong- 
ing to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical ex- 
tent, alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to 
his own; the carpenter’s pursuit being the ancient and outbranching 
trunk of all those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do 
with wood as an auxiliary material. But, besides the application to 
him of the generic remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was 
singularly efficient in those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies, 
continually recurring in a large ship, upon a three or four years’ 
voyage, in uncivilised and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his 
readiness in ordinary duties: — repairing stove boats, sprung spars, re- 
forming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull’s-eyes in the 
deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks, and other miscellaneous 


431 


THE WHITE WHALE 

matters more directly pertaining to his special business; he was more- 
over unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both 
useful and capricious. 

The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so mani- 
fold, was his vice-bench; a long, rude, ponderous table furnished with 
several vices of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all 
times except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely 
lashed athwartships against the rear of the try-works. 

A belaying-pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole: 
the carpenter claps it into one of his every-ready vices, and straightway 
files it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage strays on board, 
and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of right- whale bone, 
and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda- 
looking cage for it. An oarsman sprains his wrist: the carpenter 
concocts a soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermilion stars to be 
painted upon the blade of his every oar. Screwing each oar in his big 
vice of wood, the carpenter symmetrically supplies the constellation. 
A sailor takes a fancy to wear sharkbone earrings : the carpenter drills 
his ears. Another has the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and 
clapping one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there; but the 
poor fellow unmanageably winces under the unconcluded operation; 
whirling round the handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter signs him 
to clap his jaw in that, if he would have him draw the tooth. 

Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent 
and without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he 
deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. 
But while now upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished, and 
with such liveliness of expertness in him, too, all this would seem 
to argue some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not pre- 
cisely so. For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a cer- 
tain impersonal stolidity as it were ; impersonal, I say ; for it so shaded 
off into the surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with 
the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which, 
while pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its 
peace, and ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals. 
Yet was this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it ap- 


432 


MOBY DICK; OR 

peared, an all-ramifying heartlessness ; — yet was it oddly daslied at 
times, with an old, crutch-like antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, 
not unstreaked now and then with a certain grizzled wittiness ; such 
as might have served to pass the time during the midnight watch on 
the bearded forecastle of Noah’s ark. Was it that this old carpenter 
had been a lifelong wanderer, whose much rolling to and fro not only 
had gathered no moss, hut what is more, had rubbed off whatever 
small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him ? He 
was a stripped abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised 
as a new-born babe; living without premeditated reference to this 
world or the next. You might almost say, that this strange uncom- 
promisedness in him involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his nu- 
merous trades, he did not seem to work so much by reason or by in- 
stinct, or simply because he had been tutored to it, or by any inter- 
mixture of all of these, even or uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf 
and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a pure manipulator; 
his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into 
the muscles of his fingers. He was like one of those unreasoning but 
still highly useful multum in parvo , Sheffield contrivances, assuming 
the exterior — though a little swelled — of a common pocket-knife; but 
containing, not only blades of various sizes, but also screw-drivers, 
corkscrews, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nail-filers, counter-sinkers. 
So, if his superiors wanted to use the carpenter for a screw-driver, 
all they had to do was to open that part of him, and the screw 
was fast; or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs, and there they 
were. 

Yet, as previously hinted, this omni-tooled, open-and-shut carpenter, 
was after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have 
a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow 
anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksil- 
ver, or a few drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was ; 
and there it had abided for now some sixty years or more. And 
this it was, this same unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him ; this 
it was, that kept him a great part of the time soliloquising; but only 
like an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquises; or 
rather, his body was a sentry-box and this soliloquiser on guard there, 
and talking all the time to keep himself awake. 


THE WHITE WHALE 


433 


CHAPTER CYII 

AHAB AND THE CARPENTER 
THE DECK FIRST NIGHT WATCH 

( Carpenter standing before bis vice-bench , and by the light of two 
lanterns busily filing the ivory- joist for the leg , which joist is firmly 
fixed in the vice. Slabs of ivory , leather straps , pads, screws, and * 
various tools of all sorts lying about the bench. Forward, the red 
flame of the forge is seen, where the blacksmith is at work. 

“Drat the file, and drat the hone! That is hard which should be soft, 
and that is soft which should be hard. So we go, who file old jaws 
and shinbones. Let’s try another. Aye, now, this works better 
(sneezes). Halloa, this bone dust is (sneezes) — why it’s (sneezes ) — 
yes it’s (sneezes) — bless my soul, it won’t let me speak! This is what 
an old fellow gets now for working in dead lumber. Saw a live tree, 
and you don’t get this dust; amputate a live hone, and you don’t get 
it (sneezes). Come, come, you old Smut, there, bear a hand, and let’s 
have that ferule and buckle-screw; I’ll be ready for them presently. 
Lucky now (sneezes) there’s no knee-joint to make; that might puzzle 
a little ; but a mere shinbone — why it’s easy as making hop-poles ; only 
I should like to put a good finish on. Time, time ; if I but only had 
the time, I could turn him out as neat a leg now as ever (sneezes) 
scraped to a lady in a parlour. Those buckskin legs and calves of legs 
I’ve seen in shop windows wouldn’t compare at all. They soak water, 
they do ; and of course get rheumatic, and have to be doctored (sneezes) 
with washes and lotions, just like live legs. There ; before I saw it off, 
now, I must call his old Mogulship, and see whether the length will be 
all right; too short, if anything, I guess. Ha! that’s the heel; we are 
in luck ; here he comes, or it’s somebody else, that’s certain.” 

ahab (advancing). 

(During the ensuing scene, the carpenter continues sneezing at times.) 

“Well, man-maker!” 

“Just in time, sir. If the captain pleases, I will now mark the 
length. Let me measure, sir.” 


434 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“Measured for a leg! good. Well, it’s not the first time. About 
it! There; keep thy finger on it. This is a cogent vice thou hast 
here, carpenter; let me feel its grip once. So, so; it does pinch some.” 

“Oh, sir, it will break hones — beware, beware !” 

“No fear ; I like a good grip ; I like to feel something in this slippery 
world that can hold, man. What’s Prometheus about there? — the 
blacksmith, I mean — what’s he about? 

“He must be forging the buckle-screw, sir, now.” 

“Right. It’s a partnership; he supplies the muscle part. He 
makes a fierce red flame there !” 

“Aye, sir; he must have the white heat for this kind of fine work.” 

“Um-m. So he must. I do deem it now a most meaning thing, 
that that old Greek, Prometheus, who made men,, they say, should 
have been a blacksmith, and animated them with fire; for what’s 
made in fire must properly belong to fire ; and so hell’s probable. How 
the soot flies ! This must he the remainder the Greek made the Afri- 
cans of. Carpenter, when he’s through with that buckle, tell him to forge 
a pair of steel shoulder-blades; there’s a pedlar abroad with a crush- 
ing pack.” 

“Sir?” 

“Hold; while Prometheus is about it, I’ll order a complete man 
after a desirable pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks ; then, 
chest modelled after the Thames Tunnel ; then, legs with roots to ’em, 
to stay in one place ; then, arms three feet through the wrist ; no heart 
at all, brass forehead, and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains ; and 
let me see — shall I order eyes to see outwards ? Ho, but put a skylight 
on top of his head to illuminate inwards. There, take the order, and 
away.” 

“How, what’s he speaking about, and who’s he speaking to, I should 
like to know ? Shall I keep standing here ?” (aside). 

“ ’Tis but indifferent architecture to make a blind dome; here’s one. 
Ho, no, no ; I must have a lantern.” 

“Ho, ho! That’s it, hey? Here are two, sir; one will serve my 
turn.” 

“What art thou thrusting that thief -catcher into my face for, man ? 
Thrusted light i§ worse than presented pistols,” 


435 


THE WHITE WHALE 

“I thought, sir, that you spoke to carpenter.” 

“Carpenter? why that’s — but no; — a very tidy, and, I may say, 
an extremely gentlemanlike sort of business thou art in here, carpen- 
ter ; — or wouldst thou rather work in clay V 9 

“Sir ? — Clay ? clay, sir ? That’s mud ; we leave clay to ditchers, 
sir.” y 

“T^e fellow’s impious ! What art thou sneezing about ?” 

“Bone is rather dusty, sir.” 

“Take the hint, then; and when thou art dead, never bury thyself 
under living people’s noses.” 

“Sir? — Oh! ah! — I guess so; — yes — oh, dear!” 

“Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good 
workmanlike workman, eh ? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well 
for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall 
nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that 
is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst 
thou not drive that old Adam away ?” 

“Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have 
heard something curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted 
man never entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be 
still pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it be really so, 
sir ?” 

“It is, man. Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine 
once was ; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to 
the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there to a 
hair, do I. Is’t a riddle ?” 

“I should humbly call it a poser, sir.” 

“Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, think- 
ing thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing pre- 
cisely where thou now standest ; aye, and standing there in thy spite ? 
In thy most solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? 
Hold, don’t speak! And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, 
though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayest not thou, car- 
penter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body ? Hah !” 

“Good Lord ! Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must calculate over 
again ; I think I didn’t carry a small figure, sir.” 


436 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“Look ye, pudding-heads should never- grant premises — How long 
before the leg is done?” 

“Perhaps an hour, sir.” 

“Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me ( turns to go ). Oh, 
Life, here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this 
blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal interin- 
debtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as 
air ; and I’m down in the whole world’s books. I am so rich, I could 
have given bid for bid with the wealthiest Praetorians at the auction 
of the Roman empire (which was the world’s) ; and yet I owe for the 
flesh in the tongue I brag with. By heavens ! I’ll get a crucible, and 
into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. 
So.” 


carpenter ( resuming his work). 

“Well, well, well ! Stuhb knows him best of all, and Stubb always 
says he’s queer ; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer ; 
he’s queer, says Stubb; he’s queer — queer, queer; and keeps dinning 
it into Mr. Starbuck all the time — queer, sir — queer, queer, very queer. 
And here’s his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here’s his bedfellow! 
has a stick of whale’s jawbone for a wife! And this is his leg; he’ll 
stand on this. What was that now about one leg standing in three 
places, and all three places standing in one hell — how was that ? Oh ! 
I don’t wonder he looked so scornful at me! I am a sort of strange- 
thoughted sometimes, they say; but that’s only haphazard-like. Then, 
a short, little old body like me, should never undertake to wade out into 
deep waters with tall, heron-built captains; the water chucks you un- 
der the chin pretty quick, and there’s a great cry for lifeboats. And 
here’s the heron’s leg! long and slim, sure enough! How, for most 
folks one pair of legs lasts a lifetime, and that must be because they 
use them mercifully, as a tender-hearted old lady uses her roly-poly 
old coach-horses. But Ahab; oh, he’s a hard driver. Look, driven 
one leg to death, and spavined the other for life, and now wears out 
bone legs by the cord. Halloa, there, you, Smut! bear a hand there 
with those screws, and let’s finish it! What a leg this is! It looks 
like a real live leg, filed down to nothing but the core ; he’ll be standing 


437 


THE WHITE WHALE 

on this to-morrow ; he’ll he taking altitudes on it. Halloa ! I almost 
forgot the little oval slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the 
latitude. So, so ; chisel, file, and sand-paper, now !” 

CHAPTER CVIII 

AHAB AND STARBUCK IN THE CABIN 

According to usage they were pumping the ship next morning; and 
lo! no inconsiderable oil came up with the water ; the casks below must 
have sprung a bad leak. Much concern was shown; and Starbuck 
went down into the cabin to report this unfavourable affair . 1 

How, from the south and west the Pequod was drawing nigh to 
Formosa and the Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical 
outlets from the China waters into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found 
Ahab with a general chart of the Oriental archipelagoes spread before 
him; and another separate one representing the long eastern coasts 
of the Japanese islands — Hiphon, Mastmai, and Sikoke. With his 
snow-white new ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, 
and with a long pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous 
old man, with his back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, 
and tracing his old courses again. 

“Who’s there?” hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning 
round to it. “On deck! Begone!” 

“Captain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, 
sir. We must up Burtons and break out.” 

“Up Burton and break out? How that we are nearing Japan; 
heave-to here for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops ?” 

“Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make 
good in a year. What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth 
saving, sir.” 

“So it is, so it is ; if we get it.” 

1 In Sperm- whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it 
is a regular semi-weekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and drench 
the casks with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying intervals is removed 
by the ship’s pumps. Hereby the casks are sought to be kept damply tight, 
while by the changed character of the withdrawn water, the mariners readily 
detect any serious leakage in the precious cargo. 


438 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“I was speaking of the oil in the hold, sir.” 

“And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone ! Let 
it leak! I’m all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full 
of leaky casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that’s a 
far worse plight than the Pequod’s, man. Yet I don’t stop to plug 
my leak ; for who can find it in the deep-loaded hull ; or how hope to 
plug it, even if found, in this life’s howling gale ? Starbuck ! I’ll not 
have the Burtons hoisted.” 

“What will the owners say, sir ?” 

“Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. 
What cares Ahab ? Owners, owners ? Thou art always prating to 
me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my 
conscience. But look ye, the only real owner of anything is its com- 
mander; and hark ye, my conscience is in this ship’s keel — On deck!” 

“Captain Ahab,” said the reddening mate, moving further into the 
cabin, with a daring so strangely respectful and cautious that it al- 
most seemed not only every way seeking to avoid the slightest outward 
manifestation of itself, but within also seemed more than half distrust- 
ful of itself ; “a better man than I might well pass over in thee what 
he would quickly enough resent in a younger man ; ay, and in a happier, 
Captain Ahab.” 

“Devils! Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of 
me? — On deck!” 

“Nay, sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir — to be for- 
bearing! Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto, 
Captain Ahab?” 

Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most 
South Sea men’s cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck, 
exclaimed: “There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one 
Captain that is lord over the Pequod — On deck!” 

For an instant in the flashing eyes of the mate, and his fiery cheeks, 
you would have almost thought that he had really received the blaze of 
the levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion, he half calmly rose, and 
as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and said: “Thou hast 
outraged, not insulted me, sir ; but for that I ask thee not to beware of 
Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; be- 
ware of thyself, old man,” 


©C1K1G9290 



© Dadd, Mead & Company, Inc. 

* 'there is one god that is lord over the earth, and one captain that is lord over 

THE PEQUOD ON DECK !” 


I 






























* 













































THE WHITE WHALE 


439 


“He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys ; most careful bravery that !” 
murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. “What’s that he said — 
Ahab beware of Ahab — there’s something there!” Then unconsciously 
using the musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in 
the little cabin ; but presently the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed, 
and returning the gun to the rack, he went to the deck. 

“Thou art but too good a fellow, Starbuck,” he said lowly to the 
mate; then raising his voice to the crew: “Furl the t’gallant-sails, 
and close-reef the topsails, fore and aft ; back the mainyard ; up Burton, 
and break out in the mainhold.” 

It were perhaps vain to surmise exactly why it was, that as respecting 
Starbuck, Ahab thus acted. It may have been a flash of honesty in 
him ; or mere prudential policy which, under the circumstance, imperi- 
ously forbade the slightest symptom of open disaffection, however tran- 
sient, in the important chief officer of his ship. However it was, his 
orders were executed ; and the Burtons were hoisted. 

CHAPTER CIX 

QUEEQUEG IN' HIS COFFIN 

Upon searching, it was found that the casks last struck into the hold 
were perfectly sound, and that the leak must be further off. So, it 
being calm weather, they broke out deeper and deeper, disturbing the 
slumbers of the huge ground-tier butts ; and from that black midnight 
sending those gigantic moles into the daylight above. So deep did they 
go ; $nd so ancient, and corroded, and weedy the aspect of the lowermost 
puncheons, that you almost looked next for some mouldy corner-stone 
cask containing coins of Captain Xoah with copies of the posted pla- 
cards, vainly warning the infatuated old world from the flood. Tierce 
after tierce, too, of water, and bread, and beef, and shooks of staves, and 
iron bundles of hoops, were hoisted out, till at last the piled decks were 
hard to get about ; and the hollow hull echoed under foot, as if you were 
treading over empty catacombs, and reeled and rolled in the sea like an 
air-freighted demijohn. Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless stu- 
dent with all Aristotle in his head. Well was it that the Typhoons did 
not visit them then. 


440 


MOBY DICK; OR 

blow, at this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast 
bosom friend, Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which brought him 
nigh to his endless end. 

Be it said, that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown ; 
dignity and danger go hand in hand; till you get to he captain, the 
higher you rise the harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg, who, as 
harpooneer, must not only face all the rage of the living whale, hut — 
as we have elsewhere seen — mount his dead back in a rolling sea ; and 
finally descend into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating all 
day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the clum- 
siest casks and see to their stowage. To he short, among whalemen, the 
harpooneers are the holders, so called. 

Poor Queequeg! when the ship was about half disembowelled, you 
should have stooped over the hatchway, and peered down upon him 
there; where, stripped to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage was 
crawling about amid that dampness and slime, like a green spotted 
lizard at the bottom of a well. And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow 
proved to him, poor pagan; where, strange to say, for all the heat of 
his sweatings, he caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever ; and 
at last, after some days’ suffering, laid him in his hammock, close to 
the very sill of the door of death. How he wasted and wasted away 
in those few long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of 
him but his frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and 
his cheekbones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing 
fuller and fuller; they became of a strange softness of lustre; and 
mildly hut deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous 
testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be 
weakened. And like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, 
expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of 
Eternity. An awe that cannot he named would steal over you as you 
sat by the side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his 
face as any beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died. Eor 
whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into 
words or books. And the drawing near of Death, which alike levels 
all, alike impresses all with a last revelation, which only an author 
from the dead could adequately tell. So that — let us say it again — 
no dying Chaldee or Greek had higher and holier thoughts than those 


THE WHITE WHALE 441 

whose mysterious shades you saw creeping over the face of poor Quee- 
queg, as he quietly lay in his swaying hammock, and the rolling sea 
seemed gently rocking him to his final rest, and the ocean’s invisible 
floodtide lifted him higher and higher towards his destined heaven. 

Not a man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg him- 
self, what he thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious fa- 
vour he asked. He called one to him in the grey morning watch, when 
the day was just breaking, and taking his hand, said that while in Nan- 
tucket he had chanced to see certain little canoes of dark wood, like 
the rich war-wood of his native isle ; and upon inquiry, he had learned 
that all whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark 
canoes, and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him; 
for it was not unlike the custom of his own race, who, after embalming 
a dead warrior, stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be 
floated away to the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe 
that the stars are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their 
own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so 
form the white breakers of the milky way — after saying this, he added, 
that he shuddered at the thought of being buried in his hammock, ac- 
cording to the usual sea-custom, tossed like something vile to the death- 
devouring sharks. No: he desired a canoe like those of Nantucket, 
all the more congenial to him, being a whaleman, that like a whale 
boat these coffin-canoes were without a keel ; though that involved but 
uncertain steering, and much leeway adown the dim ages. 

Now, when this strange circumstance was made known aft, the car- 
penter was at once commanded to do Queequeg’ s bidding, whatever it 
might include. There was some heathenish, coffin-coloured old lumber 
aboard, which, upon a long previous voyage, had been cut from the 
aboriginal groves of the Lackaday Islands, and from these dark planks 
the coffin was recommended to be made. No sooner was the carpenter 
apprised of the order, than taking his rule, he forthwith with all the 
indifferent promptitude of his character, proceeded into the forecastle 
and took Queequeg’ s measure with great accuracy, regularly chalking 
Queequeg’ s person as he shifted the rule. 

“Ah! poor fellow! he’ll have to die now,” ejaculated the Long Is- 
land sailor. 

Going to his vice-bench, the carpenter for convenience sake and 


442 


MOBY DICK; OR 

general reference, now transferringly measured on it the exact length 
the coffin was to be, and then made the transfer permanent by cutting 
two notches as its extremities. This done, he marshalled the planks 
and his tools, and to work. 

When the last nail was driven, and the lid duly planed and fitted, 
he lightly shouldered the coffin and went forward with it, enquiring 
whether they were ready for it yet in that direction. 

Overhearing the indignant but half-humorous cries with which the 
people on deck began to drive the coffin away, Queequeg, to every one’s 
consternation, commanded that the thing should be instantly brought 
to him, nor was there any denying him; seeing that, of all mortals, 
some dying men are the most tyrannical ; and certainly, since they will 
shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be 
indulged. 

Leaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin 
with an attentive eye. He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden 
stock drawn from it, and then had the iron part placed in the coffin 
along with one of the paddles of his boat. All by his own request, 
also, biscuits were then ranged round the sides within : a flask of fresh 
water was placed at the head, and a small bag of woody earth scraped 
up in the hold at the foot; and a piece of sail-cloth being rolled up 
for a pillow, Queequeg now entreated to be lifted into his final bed, 
that he might make trial of its comforts, if any it had. He lay with- 
out moving a few minutes, then told one to go to his bag and bring out 
his little god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms on his breast with Yojo 
between, he called for the coffin lid (hatch he called it) to he placed 
over him. The head part turned over with a leather hinge, and there 
lay Queequeg in his coffin with little but his composed countenance in 
view. “Rarmai” (it will do; it is easy), he murmured, at last, and 
signed to be replaced in his hammock. 

But ere this was done, Pip, who had been slyly hovering near by 
all this while, drew nigh to him where he lay, and with soft sobbings, 
took him by the hand ; in the other, holding his tambourine. 

“Poor rover! will ye never have done with all this weary roving? 
where go ye now ? But if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles 
where the beaches are only beat with water-lilies, will ye do one little 


THE WHITE WHALE 


443 


errand for me? Seek out one Pip, who’s now been missing long: I 
think he’s in those far Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him; 
for he must be very sad ; for look ! he’s left his tambourine behind ; — 
I found it. Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! How, Queequeg,, die; and I’ll beat 
ye your dying march.” 

“I have heard,” murmured Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, “that 
in violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues; 
and that when the mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their 
wholly forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken 
in their hearing by some lofty scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor 
Pip, in this strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers 
of all our heavenly homes. Where learned he that, but there? — 
Hark! he speaks again: but more wildly now.” 

“Form two and two! Let’s make a General of him! Ho, where’s 
his harpoon ? Lay it across here — Pig-a-dig, dig, dig ! huzza ! Oh, 
for a game-cock now to sit upon his head and crow! Queequeg dies 
game! — mind ye that; Queequeg dies game! — take ye good heed of 
that ; Queequeg dies game ! I say ; game, game, game ! but base little 
Pip, he died a coward; died all a-shiver;- — out upon Pip! Hark ye: 
if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles he’s a runaway ; a coward, a coward, 
a coward ! Tell them he jumped from a whale boat ! I’d never beat 
my tambourine over base Pip, and hail him General, if he were once 
more dying here. Ho, no ! shame upon all cowards — shame upon 
them! Let ’em go drown like Pip, that jumped from a whale boat. 
Shame! shame!” 

During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. 
Pip was led away, and the sick man was replaced in his hammock. ’ 

But now that he had apparently made every preparation for death ; 
now that his coffin was proved a good fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied; 
soon there seemed no need of the carpenter’s box : and thereupon, when 
some expressed their delighted surprise, he, in substance, said, that 
th« cause of his sudden convalescence was this : — at a critical moment, 
he had just recalled a little duty ashore, which he was leaving undone; 
and therefore had changed his mind about dying: he could not die yet, 
he averred. They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter 
of his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, Certainly. In 


444 MOBY. DICK; OR 

a word, it was Queequeg’ s conceit that if a man made up his mind 
to live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing hut a whale, or a 
gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort. 

How, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civi- 
lised ; that while a sick, civilised man may be six months convalescing, 
generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half well again in a day. 
So, in good time my Queequeg gained strength ; and at length after sit- 
ting on the windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with a vigorous 
appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out his arms and legs, 
gave himself a good stretching, yawned a little hit, and then springing 
into the head of his hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon, pronounced 
himself fit for a fight. 

With a wild whimsiness, he now used his cotfin for a sea-chest ; and 
emptying into it his canvas hag of clothes, set them in order there. 
Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of gro- 
tesque figures and drawings ; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, 
in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. 
And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer 
of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his 
body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical 
treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own 
proper person was a riddle to unfold ; a wondrous work in one volume ; 
but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live 
heart heat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined 
in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they 
were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it 
must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, 
when one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg — 
“Oh, devilish tantalisation of the gods !” 

CHAPTER CX 

THE PACIFIC 

When gliding by the Bashee Isles we emerged at last upon the great 
South Sea ; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear 
Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my 


445 


THE WHITE WHALE 

youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a 
thousand leagues of blue. 

There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose 
gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; 
like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried 
evangelist, St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, 
wide-rolling, watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four conti- 
nents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly ; for 
here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnam- 
bulisms, reveries ; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dream- 
ing, still ; tossing like slumberers in their beds ; the ever-rolling waves 
but made so by their restlessness. 

To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific once beheld, 
must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters 
of the world, the Indian Ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The 
same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but 
yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded 
but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while 
all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, un- 
known Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysteri- 
ous, divine Pacific zones the world’s whole bulk about; makes all coasts 
one bay to it ; seems the tide-beating heart, of earth. Lifted by those 
eternal swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your 
head to Pan. 

But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab’s brain, as standing like an 
iron statue at his accustomed place beside the mizzen rigging, with one 
nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee Isles 
(in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the 
other consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that 
sea in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming. 
Launched at length upon these almost final waters, and gliding to- 
wards the Japanese cruising-ground, the old man’s purpose intensified 
itself. His firm lips met like the lips of a vice ; the Delta of his fore- 
head’s veins swelled like overladen brooks ; in his very sleep, his ring- 
ing cry ran through the vaulted hull, “Stem all! the White Whale 
spouts thick blood !” 


446 


MOBY DICK; OR 

CHAPTER CXI 


THE BLACKSMITH 

Availing himself of the mild, summer-cool weather that now reigned 
in these latitudes, and in preparation for the peculiarly active pursuits 
shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the begrimed, blistered old blacksmith, 
had not removed his portable forge to the hold again, after concluding 
his contributory work for Ahab’s leg, but still retained it on deck, 
fast lashed to ringbolts by the foremast ; being now almost incessantly 
invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and bowsmen to do some 
little job for them; altering, or repairing, or new shaping their various 
weapons and boat furniture. Often he would be surrounded by an 
eager circle, all waiting to he served; holding boat-spades, pike-heads, 
harpoons, and lances, and jealously watching his every sooty move- 
ment, as he toiled. Nevertheless, this old man’s was a patient ham- 
mer wielded by a patient arm. No murmur, no impatience, no petu- 
lance did come from him. Silent, slow, and solemn ; bowing over still 
further his chronically broken back, he toiled away, as if toil were 
life itself, and the heavy beating of his hammer the heavy beating of 
his heart. And so it was. — Most miserable! 

A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight hut painful ap- 
pearing yawing in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage ex- 
cited the curiosity of the mariners. And to the importunity of their 
persisted questionings he had finally given in; and so it came to 
pass that every one now knew the shameful story of his wretched 
fate. 

Belated and not innocently, one hitter winter’s midnight, on the 
road running between two country towns, the blacksmith half-stupidlv 
felt the deadly numbness stealing over him and sought refuge in a 
leaning, dilapidated barn. The issue was, the loss of the extremities 
of both feet. Out of this revelation, part by part, at last came out 
the four acts of the gladness, and the one long, and as yet uncatastro- 
phied fifth act of the grief of his life’s drama. 

He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedlv 
encountered that thing in sorrow’s technicals called ruin. He had 
been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a 


447 


THE WHITE WHALE 

house and garden ; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, 
and three blithe, ruddy children ; every Sunday went to a cheerful- 
looking church, planted in a grove. But one night, under cover of 
darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a 
desperate burglar slid into his happy home, and robbed them all of 
everything. And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself did igno- 
rantly conduct this burglar into his family’s heart. It was the Bottle 
Conjuror ! Upon the opening of that fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, 
and shrivelled up his home. Uow, for prudent, most wise, and eco- 
nomic reasons, the blacksmith’s shop was in the basement of his dwell- 
ing, but with a separate entrance to it ; so that always had the young and 
loving healthy wife listened with no unhappy nervousness, but with 
vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of her young-armed old hus- 
band’s hammer; whose reverberations, muffled by passing through the 
floors and walls, came up to her, not unsweetly, in her nursery; and 
so, to stout Labour’s lullaby, the blacksmith’s infants were rocked to 
slumber. 

Oh, woe on woe ! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be 
timely? Hadst thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full 
ruin came upon him, then had the young widow had a delicious grief, 
and her orphans a truly venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their 
after years; and all of them a care-killing competency. But Death 
plucked down some virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily 
toil solely hung the responsibilities of some other family,, and left the 
worse than useless old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should 
make him easier to harvest. 

Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every 
day grew more and more between; and each blow every day grew 
fainter than the last; the wife sat frozen at the window, with tear- 
less eyes, glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children; 
the bellows fell; the forge choked up with cinders; the house was 
sold ; the mother dived down into the long churchyard grass ; her chil- 
dren twice followed her thither ; and the houseless, familyless old man 
staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his 
grey head a scorn to flaxen curls ! 

Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but 
Death is only a launching into the reign of the strange Untried; it 


448 


MOBY DICK; OR 

is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, 
the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing 
eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunc- 
tions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean 
alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, 
and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite 
Pacifies, the thousand mermaids sing to them — “Come hither, broken- 
hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; 
here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither ! 
bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and abhor- 
ring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! put 
up thy gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither,, till we 
marry thee!” 

Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and 
by fall of eve, the blacksmith’s soul responded, Aye, I come! And 
so Perth went a-whaling. 


CHAPTER CXII 

THE FORGE 

With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling sharkskin apron, about 
midday, Perth was standing between his forge and anvil, the latter 
placed upon an iron-wood log, with one hand holding a pike-head in 
the coals, and with the other at his forge’s lungs, when Captain Ahab 
came along, carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking leathern bag. 
While yet a little distance from the forge, moody Ahab paused; till 
at last, Perth, withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering 
it upon the anvil — the red mass sending off the sparks in thick hover- 
ing flights, some of which flew close to Ahab. 

“Are these thy Mother Carey’s chickens, Perth? they are always 
flying in thy wake ; birds of good omen,, too, but not to all ; — look here, 
they burn; but thou — thou liv’st among them without a scorch.” 

“Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab,” answered Perth, 
resting for a moment on his hammer; “I am past scorching; not easily 
canst thou scorch a scar.” 


449 


THE WHITE WHALE 

“Well, well; no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely 
woeful to me. In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery 
in others that is not mad. Thou shouldst go mad, blacksmith; say, 
why dost thou not go mad? How canst thou endure without being 
mad ? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou canst not go mad ? — 
What wert thou making there ?” 

“Welding an old pike-head, sir; there were seams and dents in it.” 

“And canst thou make it all smooth again, blacksmith, after such 
hard usage as it had?” 

“I think so,, sir.” 

“And . I suppose thou canst smooth almost any seams and dents ; 
never mind how hard the metal, blacksmith?” 

“Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one.” 

“Look ye here, then,” cried Ahab, passionately advancing, and lean- 
ing with both hands on Perth’s shoulders; “look ye here — here — can 
ye smooth out a seam like this, blacksmith,” sweeping one hand across 
his ribbed brow; “if thou couldst, blacksmith, glad enough would I 
lay my head upon thy anvil, and feel thy heaviest hammer between 
my eyes. Answer ! Canst thou smooth this seam ?” 

“Oh ! that is the one, sir ! Said I not all seams and dents but one ?” 

“Aye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, man, it is unsmoothable ; for 
though thou only see’st it here in my flesh, it has worked down into 
the bone of my skull — that is all wrinkles! But, away with child’s 
play; no more gaffs and pikes to-day. Look ye here!” jingling the 
leathern bag, as if it were full of gold coins. “I, too, want a harpoon 
made ; one that a thousand yoke of fiends could not part, Perth ; some- 
thing that will s"tick in a whale like his own fin-bone. There’s the 
stuff,” flinging the pouch upon the anvil. “Look ye, blacksmith, these 
are the gathered nail-stubbs of the steel shoes of racing horses.” 

“Horse-shoe stubbs, sir ? Why, Captain Ahab, thou hast here, then, 
the best and stubbomest stuff we blacksmiths ever work.” 

“I know it, old man ; these stubbs will weld together like glue from 
the melted bones of murderers. Quick ! forge me the harpoon. And 
forge hie first, twelve rods for its shank; then wind, and twist, and 
hammer these twelve together like the yarns and strands of a tow-line. 
Quick ! I’ll blow the fire.” 

When at last the twelve rods were made, Ahab tried them, one by 


450 


MOBY DICK; OR 

one, by spiralling them, with his own hand, round a long, heavy iron 
bolt. “A flaw!” rejecting the last one. “Work that over again, 
Perth.” 

This done, Perth was about to begin welding the twelve into one, 
when Ahab stayed his hand, and said he would weld his own iron. As, 
then, with regular, gasping hems, he hammered on the anvil, Perth 
passing to him the glowing rods, one after the other, and the hard 
pressed forge shooting up its intense straight flame, the Parsee passed 
silently, and bowing over his head towards the fire, seemed invoking 
some curse or some blessing on the toil. But, as Ahab looked up, he 
slid aside. 

“What’s that bunch of lucifers dodging about there for ?” muttered 
Stubb, looking on from the forecastle. “That Parsee smells fire like a 
fusee ; and smells of it himself, like a hot musket’s powder-pan.” 

At last the shank, in one complete rod, received its final heat ; and as 
Perth, to temper it, plunged it all hissing into the cask of water near 
by, the scalding steam shot up into Ahab’s bent face. 

“Wouldst thou brand me, Perth?” wincing for a moment with the 
pain ; “have I been but forging my own branding iron, then ?” 

“Pray God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab. Is not 
this harpoon for the White Whale ?” 

“For the white-fiend! But now for the barbs; thou must make 
them, thyself, man. Here are my razors — the best of steel ; here, and 
make the barbs sharp as the needle-sleet of the Icy Sea.” 

For a moment, the old blacksmith eyed the razors as though he would 
fain not use them. 

“Take them, man, I have no need for them ; for I now neither shave, 
sup, nor pray till but here — to work!” 

Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the 
shank, the steel soon pointed the end of the iron ; and as the blacksmith 
was about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering them, he 
cried to Ahab to place the water-cask near. 

“Ho, no — no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. 
Ahoy, there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! 
Will ye give me as much blood as will cover this barb ?” holding it high 
up. A cluster of dark nods replied, “Yes.” Three punctures were 


THE WHITE WHALE «i 

made in the heathen flesh, and the White Whale’s barbs were then 
tempered. 

“Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaholi !” deliri- 
ously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the 
baptismal blood. 

Now, mustering the spare poles from below, and selecting one of 
hickory, with the bark still investing it, Ahab fitted the end to the 
socket of the iron. A coil of new tow-line was then unwound, and some 
fathoms of it taken to the windlass, and stretched to a great tension. 
Pressing his foot upon it, till the rope hummed like a harpstring, then 
eagerly bending over it, and seeing no strandings, Ahab exclaimed 
“Good! and now for the seizings.” 

At one extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread 
yarns were all braided and woven round the socket of the harpoon ; the 
pole was then driven hard up into the socket ; from the lower end the 
rope was traced half-way along the pole’s length, and firmly secured so, 
with intertwistings of twine. This done, pole, iron, and rope — like the 
Three Fates — remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away 
with the weapon ; the sound of his ivory leg and the sound of the hick- 
ory pole, both hollowly ringing along every plank. But ere he entered 
his cabin, a light unnatural, half-bantering, yet most piteous sound was 
heard. Oh, Pip ! thy wretched laugh, thy idle, unresting eye ; all thy 
strange mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the black tragedy of 
the melancholy ship, and mocked it! 

CHAPTER CXIII 

THE GILDER 

Penetrating furthur and further into the heart of the J apanese cruis- 
ing ground, the Pequod was soon all astir in the fishery. Often, in 
mild, pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty hours 
on the stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily pulling, or 
sailing, or paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of sixty or. 
seventy minutes calmly awaiting their uprising ; though with but small 
success for their pains. 


452 


MOBY DICK; OR 

At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, 
slow heaving swells ; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe ; and so 
sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearthstone 
cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy 
quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the 
ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and 
would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a 
remorseless fang. 

These are the times, when in his whale boat the rover softly feels 
a certain filial confident, land-like feeling toward the sea; that he re- 
gards it as so much flowery earth ; and the distant ship revealing only 
the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through 
high rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: 
as when the western emigrants’ horses only show their erected 
. ears, while their hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing 
verdure. 

The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hillsides; as over these 
there steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied 
children lie sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when 
the flowers of the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your 
most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, inter- 
penetrate, and form one seamless whole. 

Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as 
temporary an effect on Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did 
seem to open in him his own secret golden treasuries, yet did his breath 
upon them prove but tarnishing. 

Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; 
in ye, though long parched by the dead drought of the earthly life, — 
in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover ; and 
for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal 
on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the 
mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof : calms 
crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady un- 
retracing progress in this life ; we do not advance through fixed grada- 
tions, and at the last one pause: — through infancy’s unconscious spell, 
boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence, doubt (the common doom), 
then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering 


THE WHITE WHALE 


453 


repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again: and 
are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final har- 
bour, whence we unmoor no more ? In what rapt ether sails the world 
of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s 
father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded 
mothers die in bearing them; the secret of our paternity lies in their 
grave, and we must there to learn it. 

And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat’s side into 
that same golden sea, Starhuck lowly murmured: — 

“Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s 
eye! — Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping can- 
nibal ways. Let faith oust fact ; let fancy oust memory ; I look deep 
down and do believe.” 

And Stuhb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that same 
golden light: — 

“I am Stubh, and Stubb has his history ; hut here Stuhb takes oaths 
that he has always been jolly!” 

CHAPTER CXIV 

THE PEQTJOD MEETS THE BACHELOR 

And jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came hearing 
down before the wind, some few weeks after Ahab’s harpoon had been 
welded. 

It was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor , which had just wedged in 
her last cask of oil, and bolted down her bursting hatches; and now, 
in glad holiday apparel was joyously, though somewhat vain-gloriously, 
sailing round among the widely-separated ships on the ground, previ- 
ous to pointing her prow for home. 

The three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red 
bunting at their hats; from the stern, a whale-boat was suspended, 
bottom down; and hanging captive from the bowsprit was seen the 
long lower jaw of the last whale they had slain. Signals, ensigns, and 
jacks of all colours were flying from her rigging, on every side. Side- 
ways lashed in each of her three basketed tops were two barrels of 
sperm; abcive. which, in her top-mast cross-trees, you saw slepder 


454 MOBY DICK; OR 

breakers of the same precious fluid; and nailed to her main truck was 
a brazen lamp. 

As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with the most 
surprising success; all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in 
the same seas numerous other vessels had gone entire months without 
securing a single fish. Not only had barrels of beef and bread been 
given away to make room for the far more valuable sperm, but addi- 
tional supplemental casks had been bartered for, from the ships she had 
met; and these were stowed along the deck, and in the captain’s and 
officers’ state-rooms. Even the cabin table itself had been knocked into 
kindling-wood ; and the cabin mess dined off the broad head of an oil- 
butt, lashed down to the floor for a centrepiece. In the forecastle, the 
sailors had actually caulked and pitched their chests, and filled them; 
it was humorously added, that the cook had clapped a head on his 
largest boiler, and filled it; that the steward had plugged his spare 
coffee-pot and filled it; that the harpooneers had headed the sockets 
of their irons and filled them; that indeed everything was filled with 
sperm, except the captain’s pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved 
to thrust his hands into, in self-complacent testimony of his entire 
satisfaction. 

As this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod , 
the barbarian sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle ; and 
drawing still nearer, a crowd of her men were seen standing round 
her huge try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like poke or 
stomach skin of the black fish, gave forth a loud roar to every stroke 
of the clenched hands of the crew. On the quarter-deck, the mates 
and harpooneers were dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped 
with them from the Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an orna- 
mented boat, firmly secured aloft between the foremast and mainmast, 
three Long Island negroes, with glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, 
were presiding over the hilarious jig. Meanwhile, others of the ship’s 
company were tumultuously busy at the masonry of the try-works, from 
which the huge pots had been removed. You would have almost 
thought they were pulling down the cursed Bastile, such wild cries 
they raised, as the now useless brick and mortar were being hurled 
into the sea. 

Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the 


THE WHITE WHALE 455 

ship’s elevated quarter-deck, so that the whole rejoicing drama was 
full before him, and seemed merely contrived for his own individual di- 
version. 

And Ahab, he too was standing on his quarter-deck, shaggy and 
black,, with a stubborn gloom ; and as the two ships crossed each other’s 
wakes — one all jubilations for things passed, the other all forebodings 
as to things to come— -their two captains in themselves impersonated 
the whole striking contrast of the scene. 

“Come aboard, come aboard !” cried the gay Bachelor's commander, 
lifting a glass and a bottle in the air. 

“Hast seen the White Whale ?” gritted Ahab in reply. 

“Ho; only heard of him; but don’t believe in him at all,” said the 
other good-humouredly. “Come aboard !” 

“Thou art too damned jolly. Sail on. Hast lost any men?” 

“Hot enough to speak of — two islanders, that’s all; — but come 
aboard, old hearty, come along. I’ll soon take that black from your 
brow. Come along, will ye (merry’s the play) ; a full ship and home- 
ward-bound.” 

“How wondrous familiar is a fool !” muttered Ahab ; then aloud, 
“Thou art a full ship and homeward bound, thou say’st; well, then, 
call me an empty ship, and outward-bound. So go thy ways, and I 
will mine. Forward there! Set all sail, and keep her to the wind!” 

And thus, while the one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the 
other stubbornly fought against it ; and so the two vessels parted ; the 
crew of the Pequod looking with grave, lingering glances towards the 
receding Bachelor ; but the Bachelor's men never heeding their gaze 
for the lively revelry they were in. And as Ahab, leaning over the 
taffrail, eyed the homeward-bound craft he took from his pocket a small 
vial of sand, and then looking from the ship to the vial, seemed thereby 
bringing two remote associations together, for that vial was filled 
with Hantucket soundings. 


CHAPTER CXV 

THE DYING WHALE 


Hot seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune’s favourites 


456 


MOBY DICK; OR 

sail close by us, we, though all adroop before, catch somewhat of the 
rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails fill out. So seemed 
it with the Pequod. For next day after encountering the gay Bache- 
lor, whales were seen and four were slain; and one of them by Ahab. 

It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the 
crimson fight were done: and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, 
sun and whale both stilly died together; then, such a sweetness and 
such plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, 
that it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys 
of the Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor, 
had gone to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns. 

Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had 
stemed off from the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from 
the now tranquil boat. For that strange spectacle observable in all 
sperm whales dying — the turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring 
— that strange spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to 
Ahab conveyed a wondrousness unknown before. 

“He turns and turns him to it, — how slowly, but how steadfastly, 
his homage-rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. 
He too worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun! 

4 — Oh that these too-favouring eyes should see these too-favouring 
sights. Look ! here, far waterlocked ; beyond all hum of human weal 
or woe; in these most candid and impartial seas; where to traditions 
no rocks furnish tablets ; where for long Chinese ages, the billows have 
still rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine upon the 
Niger’s unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith; 
but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it 
heads some other way. 

“Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast 
builded thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unver- 
dured seas ; thou art an infidel, thou queen,' and too truly speakest to 
me in the wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its 
after calm. Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, 
and then gone round again, without a lesson to me. 

“Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, 
rainbowed jet! — that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In 
vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening 


THE WHITE WHALE «7 

sun, that only calls forth life, hut gives it not again. Yet dost thou, 
darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy un- 
namable imminglings float beneath me here ; I am buoyed by breaths of 
once living things, exhaled as air, but water now. 

“Then hail, for ever hail, 0 sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild 
fowl finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea ; though 
hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers I” 

CHAPTER CXYI 

THE WHALE WATCH 

The four whales slain that evening had died wide apart; one, far to 
windward ; one, less distant, to leeward ; one ahead ; one astern. These 
last three were brought alongside ere nightfall; but the windward one 
could not be reached till morning; and the boat that had killed it lay 
by its side all night ; and that boat was Ahab’s. 

The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale’s spouthole; 
and the lantern hanging from its top cast a troubled flickering glare 
upon the black, glossy back, and far out upon the midnight waves, 
which gently chafed the whale’s broad flank, like soft surf upon a 
beach. 

Ahab and all his boat’s crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who 
crouching in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played 
round the whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails. 
A sound like the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven 
ghosts of Gomorrah, ran shuddering through the air. 

Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and 
hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed the last men in 
a flooded world. “I have dreamed it again,” said he. 

“Of the hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse 
nor coffin can be thine ?” 

“And who are hearsed that die on the sea ?” 

“But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two 
hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea ; the first not made by 
mortal hands ; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in 
America.” 


458 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee: — a hearse and its plumes 
floating over the ocean with the waves for the pallbearers. H*a ! Such 
a sight we shall not soon see.” 

“Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, old man.” 

“And what was that saying about thyself?” 

“Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy pilot.” 

“And when thou art so gone before — if that ever befall — then ere 
I can follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still? — Was it 
not so ? Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot ! I have 
here two pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it.” 

“Take another pledge, old man,” said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted 
up like fire-flies in the gloom — “Hemp only can kill thee.” 

“The gallows, ye mean — I am immortal then, on land and on sea,” 
cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision; — “Immortal on land and on 
sea!” 

Both were silent again, as one man. The grey dawn came. on, and 
the slumbering crew arose from the boat’s bottom, and ere noon the 
dead whale was brought to the ship. 


CHAPTER CXVII 

THE QUADRANT 

The season for the Line at length drew near; and every day when 
Ahab, coming from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft, the vigilant helms- 
man would ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager mariners 
quickly run to the braces, and would stand there with all their eyes 
centrally fixed on the nailed doubloon ; impatient for the order to point 
the ship’s prow for the equator. In good time the order came. It 
was hard upon high noon; and Ahab, seated in the hows of his high- 
hoisted boat, was about taking his wonted daily observation of the sun 
to determine his latitude. 

How, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of 
effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing 
focus of the glassy ocean’s immeasurable burning-glass. The sky looks 
lacquered ; clouds there are none ; the horizon floats ; and this nakedness 


459 


THE WHITE WHALE 

of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendours of God's throne. 
Well that Ahab's quadrant was furnished with coloured glasses, through 
which to take sight of that solar fire. So, swinging his seated form 
to the roll of the ship, and with his astrological-looking instrument 
placed to his eye, he remained in that posture for some moments to 
catch the precise instant when the sun should gain the precise meridian. 
Meantime, while his whole attention was absorbed, the Parsee was 
kneeling beneath him on the ship's deck, and with face thrown up 
like Ahab’s, was eyeing the same sun with him; only the lids of his 
eyes half hooded their orbs, and his wild face was subdued to an earthly 
passionlessness. At length the desired observation was taken; and 
with his pencil upon his ivory leg, Ahab soon calculated what his 
latitude must be at that precise instant. Then falling into a moment's 
reverie, he again looked up towards the sun and murmured to him- 
self: “Thou sea-mark! thou high and mighty Pilot! thou tellest me 
truly where I am — but canst thou cast the least hint where I shall 
he ? Or canst thou tell where some other thing besides me is this mo- 
ment living ? Where is Moby Dick ? This instant thou must be eye- 
ing him. These eyes of mine look into the very eye that is even now 
beholding him; aye, and into the eye that is even now equally be- 
holding the objects on the unknown, thither side of thee, thou sun !" 

Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its 
numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered: 
“Foolish toy! babies' plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, 
and Captains ; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might ; but 
what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou 
thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee : 
no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water 
or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon ; and yet with thy impo- 
tence thou insultest the sun ! Science ! Curse thee, thou vain toy ; 
and cursed be all the things that cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven, 
whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now 
scorched with thy light, 0 sun ! Level by nature to this earth’s hori- 
zon are the glances of man's eyes ; not shot from the crown of his head, 
as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou 
quadrant !" dashing it to the deck, “no longer will I guide my earthly 
way by thee ; the level ship's compass, and the level dead-reckoning, by 


460 


MOBY DICK; OR 

log and by line ; these shall conduct me, and show me my place on the 
sea. Aye,” lighting from the boat to the deck, “thus I trample on 
thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and 
destroy thee!” 

As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live 
and dead feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and 
a fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself — these passed over 
the mute, motionless Parsee’s face. Unobserved he rose and glided 
away; while, awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the sea- 
men clustered together on the. forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing 
the deck, shouted out — “To the braces! Up helm! — square in!” 

In an instant the yards swung round ; and as the ship half wheeled 
upon her heel, her three firm-seated graceful masts erectly poised upon 
her long, ribbed hull, seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting on one 
sufficient steed. 

Standing between the knight-head Starbuck watched the Pequod’s 
tumultuous way, and Ahab’s also, as he went lurching along the deck. 

“I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full 
of its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down, 
down, to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of 
thine, what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes !” 

“Aye,” cried Stubb, “but sea-coal ashes — mind ye that, Mr. Star- 
buck — sea-coal, not your common charcoal. Well, well ; I heard Ahab 
mutter, ‘Here some one thrusts these cards into these old hands of mine ; 
swears that I must play them and no others/ And damn me, Ahab, 
but thou actest right ; live in the game, and die in it 1” 

CHAPTER CXVIII 

THE CANDLES 

Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal 
crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent 
but basket the deadliest thunders : gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that 
never swept the tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in these 
resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all 


THE WHITE WHALE 461 

storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that cloud- 
less sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town. 

Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was tom of her canvas, and 
bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly 
ahead. When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and split with the 
thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that showed the disabled masts 
fluttering here and there with the rags which the first fury of the tem- 
pest had left for its after-sport. 

Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; 
at every flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional 
disaster might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb 
and Flask were directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer lash- 
ing of the boats. But all their pains seemed naught. Though lifted 
to the very top of the cranes, the windward quarter boat (Ahab’s) did 
not escape. A great rolling sea, dashing high up against the reeling 
ship’s high tottering side, stove in the boat’s bottom at the stern, and 
left it again, all dripping through like a sieve. 

“Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck,” said Stubb, regarding the 
wreck, “but the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can’t fight it. 
You see, Mr. Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it 
leaps, all round the world it runs, and then comes the spring ! But as 
for me, all the start I have to meet it, is just across the deck here. But 
never mind ; it’s all in fun : so the old song says” ; — (sings). 

Oh! jolly is the gale, 

And a joker is the whale, 

A’ flourishin’ his tail, — 

Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh! 

The scud all a flyin’, 

That’s his flip only foamin’; 

When he stirs in the spicin’ — 

Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh ! 

Thunder splits the ships, 

But he only smacks his lips, 

A tastin’ of this flip, — 

Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh ! 


462 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“Avast, Stubb,” cried Starbuck. “Let the Typhoon sing, and strike 
bis harp here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt 
hold thy peace.” 

“But I am not a brave man ; never said I was a brave man ; I am 
a coward; and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it 
is, Mr. Starbuck, there’s no way to stop my singing in this world but 
to cut my throat. And when that’s done, ten to one I sing ye the dox- 
ology for a wind-up.” 

“Madman ! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.” 

“What! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else, 
never mind how foolish?” 

“Here!” cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and point- 
ing his hand towards the weather bow; markest thou not that the gale 
comes from the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby 
Dick ? the very course he swung to this day noon ? now mark his boat 
there ! where is that stove ! In the stern-sheets, man ; where he is wont 
to stand — his standpoint is stove, man! Now jump overboard, and 
sing away, if thou must!” 

“I don’t half understand ye: what’s in the wind?” 

“Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to Nan- 
tucket,” soliloquised Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb’s question. 
“The gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it into a 
fair wind that will drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward, all 
is blackness of doom ; but to leeward, homeward — I see it lightens up 
there ; but not with the lightning.” 

At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, follow- 
ing the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same 
instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead. 

“Who’s there?” 

“Old Thunder!” said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to 
his pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by 
elbowed lances of fire. 

Now, as the lightning-rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry 
off the perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea 
some ships carry to each mast is intended to conduct it into the water. 
But as this conductor must descend to considerable depth, that its end 


THE WHITE WHALE 463 

may avoid all contact with the hull; and as, moreover, if kept con- 
stantly towing there, it would be liable to many mishaps, besides inter- 
fering not a little with some of the rigging, and more or less impeding 
the vessel’s way in the water ; because of all this, the lower parts of a 
ship’s lightning-rods are not always overboard ; but are generally made 
in long slender links, so as to be the more readily hauled up into the 
chains outside, or thrown down into the sea, as occasion may require. 

“The rods ! the rods !” cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admon- 
ished to vigilance by the vivid lightning that had just been darting 
flambeaux, to light Ahab to his post. “Are they overboard ? drop them 
over, fore and aft. Quick !” 

“Avast!” cried Ahab; “let’s have fair play here though we be the 
weaker side. Yet I’ll contribute to raise rods on the Himalayas and 
Andes, that all the world may be secured ; but out on privileges ! Let 
them be, sir.” 

“Look aloft!” cried Starbuck. “The corposants! the corposants!” 

All the yardarms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at 
each tri-pointed lightning-rod end with three tapering white flames, 
each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, 
like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar. 

“Blast the boat ! let it go ! cried Stubb at this instant, as a swashing 
sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its gunwale violently 
jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing. “Blast it!” — but slip- 
ping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames; and 
immediately shifting his tone, he cried — “The corposants have mercy 
on us all!” 

To sailors, oaths are household words ; they will swear in the trance 
of the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest ; they will imprecate curses 
from the topsail-yardarms, when most they teeter over to a seething sea ; 
but in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when 
God’s burning finger has been laid on the ship ; when His “Mene, Mene, 
Tekel Upharsin” has been woven into the shrouds and the cordage. 

While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from 
the enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle, 
all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far-away 
constellation of stars. Believed against the ghostly light, the gigantic 


464 


MOBY DICK; OR 

jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and seemed the 
black cloud from which the thunder had come. The parted mouth of 
Tashtego revealed his shark- white teeth, which strangely gleamed as if 
they too had been tipped by corposants; while lit up by the preter- 
natural light, Queequeg’s tattooing burned like Satanic blue flames on 
his body. 

The tableau all waned at last with the pallidness aloft; and once 
more the Pequod and every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall. 
A moment or two passed, when Starbuck, going forward, pushed 
against some one. It was Stubb. “What thinkest thou now, man; I 
heard thy cry; it was not the same in the song.” 

“Ho r no, it wasn’t; I said, the corposants have mercy on us all; and 
I hope they will, still. But do they only have mercy on long faces ? — 
have they no bowels for a laugh ? And look ye, Mr. Starbuck — but it’s 
too dark to look. Hear me, then take that masthead flame we saw 
for a sign of good luck; for those masts are rooted in a hold that is 
going to be chock a’ block with sperm oil, d’ye see; and so, all that 
sperm will work up into the masts, like sap in a tree. Yes, our three 
masts will yet be as three spermaceti candles — that’s the good promise 
we saw.” 

At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb’s face slowly begin- 
ning to glimmer into sight. Glancing upwards, he cried: “See! see!” 
and once more the high tapering flames were beheld with what seemed 
redoubled supernaturalness in their pallor. 

“The corposants have mercy on us all,” cried Stubb again. 

At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the 
flame, the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab’s front, but with his head 
bowed away from him ; while near by, from the arched and overhang- 
ing rigging, where they had just been engaged securing a spar, a num- 
ber of the seamen arrested by the glare, now cohered together, and hung 
pendulous, like a knot of numbed wasps from a drooping, orchard twig. 
In various enchanted attitudes, like the standing, or stepping, or run- 
ning skeletons in Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the decks; 
but all their eyes upcast. 

“Aye, aye, men!” cried Ahab. “Look up at it; mark it well; the 
white flame but lights the way to the White Whale ! Hand me those 


465 


THE WHITE WHALE 

mainmast links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat 
against it; blood against fire! So.” Then turning — the last link 
held fast in his left hand, he put his foot upon the Parsee; and 
with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm, he stood erect before 
the lofty tri-pointed flames. 

“Oh ! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian 
once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to 
this hour I bear the scar ; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I know 
that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt 
thou be kind ; and e’en for hate thou canst but kill ; and all are killed. 
No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless 
power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its un- 
conditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the person- 
ified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at 
best ; whencesoe’er I came ; wheresoe’er I go ; yet while I earthly live, 
the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But 
war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I 
will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal 
power ; and though thou launchest navies of full-frighted worlds, there’s 
that in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of 
thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it 
back to thee.” 

[Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames leap to thrice 
their previous height; Ahab, with the rest , closes his eyes , his right 
hand pressed hard upon them*~\ 

“I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was 
it wrung from me ; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind ; 
but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. 
Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not 
take it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache 
and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on 
some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfolded, yet will I talk to 
thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am 
darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! The javelins 
cease ; open eyes ; see, or not ? There burn in the flames ! Oh, thou 
magnanimous ! now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but 


466 


MOBY DICK; OR 

my fiery father ; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel ! what hast 
thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. 
Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten ; I cer- 
tainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I 
know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnis- 
cient ! There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, 
to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. 
Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, 
thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incom- 
municable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty 
agony, I read my sire. Leap ! leap up, and lick the sky ! I leap with 
thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly 
I worship thee!” 

“The boat! the boat!” cried Starbuck; “look at thy boat, old man!” 

Ahab’s harpoon, the one forged at Perth’s fire, remained firmly 
lashed in its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his whale 
boat’s bow; but the sea that stove its bottom had caused the loose 
leather sheath to drop off ; and from the keen steel barb there now came 
a levelled flame of pale, forked fire. As the silent harpoon burned 
there like a serpent’s tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm — “God, 
God is against thee, old man ; forbear ! ’tis an ill voyage ! ill begun, ill 
continued; let me square the yards, while we may, old man, and 
make a fair wind of it homeward, to go on a better voyage than this.” 

Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-striken crew instantly ran to the 
braces — though not a sail was left aloft. Por the moment all the 
aghast mate’s thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous 
cry. But dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and snatch- 
ing the burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them; 
swearing to transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a rope’s 
end. Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery 
dart that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke — 

“All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; 
and heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And 
that ye may know to what tune this heart beats ; look ye here ; thus I 
blow out the last fear!” And with one blast of his breath he ex- 
tinguished the flame. 


467 


THE WHITE WHALE 

As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighbourhood 
of some lone, gigantic elm, whose height and strength hut render it so 
much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for thunder- 
bolts; so at those last words of Ahab’s many of the mariners did run 
from him in a terror of dismay. 


CHAPTER CXIX 

THE DECK TOWARDS THE END OF THE FIRST NIGHT WATCH 

( Ahab standing by the helm. StarbucJc approaching him.) 

“We must send down the maintopsail yard, sir. The band is work- 
ing loose, and the lee lift is half stranded. Shall I strike it, sir?” 

“Strike nothing ; lash it. If I had skysail poles, I’d sway them up 
now.” 

“Sir ? — in God’s name ! — sir ?” 

“Well.” 

“The anchors are working, sir. Shall I get them inboard ?” 

“Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything. The wind 
rises, but it has not got up to my tablelands yet. Quick, and see to it. 
— By masts and keels! he takes me for the hunch-backed skipper of 
some coasting smack. Send down my maintopsail yard! Ho, glue- 
pots! Loftiest trucks were made for wildest winds, and this brain- 
truck of mine now sails amid the cloud-scud. Shall I strike that? 
Oh, none but cowards send down their brain-trucks in tempest time. 
What a hooroosh aloft there! I would e’en take it for sublime, did 
I not know that the colic is a noisy malady. Oh, take medicine, take 
medicine !” 


CHAPTER CXX 

MIDNIGHT THE FORECASTLE BULWARKS 

( Stubb and Flash mounted on them, and passing additional lashings 
over the anchors there hanging.) 

“No, Stubb; you may pound that knot there as much as you please, 


468 


MOBY DICK; OR 

but you will never pound into me what you were just now saying. And 
bow long ago is it since you said the very contrary ? Didn’t you once 
say that whatever ship Ahab sails in, that ship should pay something 
extra on its insurance policy, just as though it were loaded with powder- 
barrels aft and boxes of lucifers forward? Stop now, didn’t you say 
so ?” 

“Well, suppose I did? What then? I’ve part changed my flesh 
since that time, why not my mind ? Besides, supposing we are loaded 
with powder-barrels aft and lucifers forward, how the devil could the 
lucifers get afire in this drenching spray here? Why, my little man, 
you have pretty red hair, but you couldn’t get afire now. Shake your- 
self! you’re Aquarius, or the water-bearer, Flask; might fill pitchers 
at your coat collar. Don’t you see, then, that for these extra risks the 
Marine Insurance companies have extra guarantees? Here are hy- 
drants, Flask. But hark, again, and I’ll answer ye the other thing. 
First take your leg off from the crown of the anchor here, though, so 
I can pass the rope; now, listen. What’s the mighty difference be- 
tween holding a mast’s lightning-rod in the storm, and standing close 
by a mast that hasn’t got any lightning-rod at all in a storm? Don’t 
you see, you timberhead, that no harm can come to the holder of the 
rod, unless the mast is first struck? What are you talking about, 
then ? Hot one ship in a hundred carries rods, and Ahab, — aye, man, 
and all of us, — were in no more danger then, in my poor opinion, than 
all the crews in ten thousand ships now sailing the seas. Why, you 
King-Post, you, I suppose you would have every man in the world go 
about with a small lightning-rod running up the corner of his hat, like 
a militia officer’s skewered feather, and trailing behind like his sash. 
Why don’t ye be sensible, Flask? it’s easy to be sensible; why don’t 
ye, then ? any man with half an eye can be sensible.” 

“I don’t know that, Stubb. You will sometimes find it rather hard.” 

“Yes, when a fellow’s soaked through, it’s hard to be sensible, that’s 
a fact. And I am about drenched with this spray. Never mind; 
catch the turn there, and pass it. Seems to me we are lashing down 
these anchors now as if they were never going to be used again. Ty- 
ing these two anchors here, Flask, seems like tying a man’s hands 
behind him. And what big generous hands they are, to be sure. These 


THE WHITE WHALE 


469 


are your iron fists, hey? What a hold they have, too! I wonder, 
Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere; if she is,, she swings 
with an uncommon long cable, though. There, hammer that knot 
down, and we’ve done. So; next to touching land, lighting on deck 
is the most satisfactory. I say, just wring out my jacket skirts, will 
ye ? Thank ye. They laugh at long-togs so, Flask ; but seems to me, 
a long-tailed coat ought always to he worn in all storms afloat. The 
tails tapering down that way, serve to carry off the water, d’ye see. 
Same with cocked hats ; the cocks form gabled-end eave-troughs, Flask. 
No more monkey-jackets and tarpaulins for me; I must mount a 
swallow-tail and drive down a heaver; so. Halloa! whew! there goes 
my tarpaulin over board; Lord, Lord, that the winds that come from 
heaven should be so unmannerly ! This is a nasty night, lad.” 


CHAPTER CXXI 

MIDNIGHT ALOFT THUNDER AND LIGHTNING 

( The maintopsail yard — Tashtego passing new lashings around it.) 

“Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up 
here. What’s the use of thunder? ITm, um, um. We don’t want 
thunder ; we want rum ; give us a glass of rum. IJm, um, um !” 


CHAPTER CXXII 

THE MUSKET 

During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the Pe- 
quod’s jawbone tiller had several times been reelingly hurled to the 
deck by its spasmodic motions, even though preventor tackles had been 
attached to it — for they were slack — because some play to the tiller 
was indispensable. 

In a severe gale like this,, while the ship is but a tossed shuttle- 
cock to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the 
compasses, at intervals, go round and round- It was thus with the 


470 


MOBY DICK; OR 

Pequod’s ; at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to notice 
the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon the cards; it is 
a sight that hardly any one can behold without some sort of unwonted 
emotion. 

Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that 
through the strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb — one en- 
gaged forward and the other aft — the shivered remnants of the jib and 
fore and maintopsails were cut adrift from the spars, and went eddy- 
ing away to leeward, like the feathers of an albatross, which some- 
times are cast to the winds when that storm-tossed bird is on the wing. 

The three corresponding new sails were now bent and reefed, and 
a storm-trysail was set further aft ; so that the ship soon went through 
the water with some precision again; and the course — for the present, 
east-south-east — which he was to steer, if practicable, was once more 
given to the helmsman. For during the violence of the gale,, he had 
only steered according to its vicissitudes. But as he was now bringing 
the ship as near her course as possible, watching the compass mean- 
while, lo ! a good sign ! the wind seemed coming round astern ; aye, the 
foul breeze became fair ! 

Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of “Ho! the fair 
wind! oh-he-yo , cheerily men !” the crew singing for joy, that so prom- 
ising an event should so soon have falsified the evil portents preceding 
it. 

In compliance with the standing order of his commander — to report 
immediately, and at every one of the twenty-four hours, any decided 
change in the affairs of the deck, — Starbuck had no sooner trimmed the 
yards to the breeze — however reluctantly and gloomily, — than he me- 
chanically went below to apprise Captain Ahab of the circumstance. 

Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it a 
moment. The cabin lamp — taking long swings this way and that — 
was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old man’s 
bolted door, — a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper 
panels. The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain 
humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the 
roar of the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly 
revealed, as they stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck 


©C1K1G9291 



DURING THE MOST VIOLENT SHOCKS OF THE 
BONE TILLER HAD SEVERAL TIMES BEEN 


TYPHOON, THE MAN AT THE PEQUOD S JAW- 
REELINGLY HURLED TO THE DECK. 


t 




THE WHITE WHALE m 

was an honest, upright man ; but out of Starbuck’s heart, at that instant 
when he saw the muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought ; 
but so blent with its neutral or good accompaniments that for the in- 
stant he hardly knew it for itself. 

‘He would have shot me once,” he murmured; “yes, there’s the 
very musket that he pointed at me ; — that one with the studded stock ; 
let me touch it lift it. Strange, that I, who have handled so many 
deadly lances, strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded ? I must 
see. Aye, aye; and powder in the pan; — that’s not good. Best spill 
it ? wait. I’ll cure myself of this. I’ll hold the musket boldly 
while I think — I come to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? 
Fair for death and doom, — that’s fair for Moby Dick. It’s a fair 
wind that’s only fair for that accursed fish. The very tube he pointed 
at me ! — the very one ; this one — I hold it here ; he would have killed 
me with the very thing I handle now — Aye, and he would fain kill all 
his crew. Does he not say he will not strike his spars to any gale? 
Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant ? and in these same perilous 
seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the error- 
abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did he not swear that he 
would have no lightning-rods ? But shall this crazed old man be 
tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with 
him? — Yes, it would make him the wilful murderer of thirty men and 
more, if this ship comes to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, 
my soul swears this ship will, if Ahab have his way. If, then, he 
were this instant — put aside, that crime would not be his. Ha! is he 
muttering in his sleep? Yes,, just there, — in there, he’s sleeping. 
Sleeping? aye, but still alive, and soon awake again. I can’t with- 
stand thee, then, old man. Hot reasoning; not remonstrance; not 
entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this thou scomest. Flat obedience 
to thy own flat commands, this is all thou breathest. Aye, and say’st 
the men have vow’d thy vow; say’st all of us are Ahabs. Great God 
forbid ! — But is there no other way ? no lawful way ? — Make him a 
prisoner to be taken home? What! hope to wrest this old man’s 
living power from his own living hands ? Only a fool would try it. 
Say he were pinioned even ; knotted all over with ropes and hawsers ; 
chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor ; he would be more hide- 


472 


MOBY DICK; OR 

ous than a caged tiger, then. I could not endure the sight; could not 
possibly fly his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable reason 
would leave me on the* long intolerable voyage. What, then, remains ? 
The land is hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan the nearest. 
I stand alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a whole 
continent between me and law — Aye, aye, ’tis so — Is heaven a mur- 
derer when its lightning strikes a would-he murderer in his bed, tin- 
dering sheets and skin together? — And would I be a murderer, then, 

if ” and slowly, stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the 

loaded musket’s end against the door. 

“On this level, Ahab’s hammock swings within: his head this way. 
A touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again. 
— Oh, Mary! Mary! — boy! boy! boy! — But if I wake thee not to 
death, old man,, who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck’s 
body this day week may sink, with all the crew! Great God, where 

art thou ? Shall I ? shall I ! The wind has gone down and shifted, 

sir; the fore and main topsails are reefed and set; she heads her 
course.” 

“Stern all ! Oh, Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last !” 

Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old 
man’s tormented sleep, as if Starbuck’s voice had caused the long 
dumb dream to speak. 

The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard’s arm against the 
panel ; Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel ; but turning from the 
door, he placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place. 

“He’s too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, 
and tell him. I must see to the deck here. Thou know’st what to 
say.” 


CHAPTER CXXIII 

THE NEEDLE 

Hext morning the not yet subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of 
mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod’s gurgling track,, pushed her 
on like giants’ palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze 
abounded so that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails ; the whole 


473 


THE WHITE WHALE 

world boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the 
invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place; 
where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of 
crowned Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The 
sea was as a crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light 
and heat. 

Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart ; and 
every time the teetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, 
he turned to eye the bright sun’s rays produced ahead; and when she 
profoundly settled by the stern, he turned behind, and saw the sun’s 
rearward place, and how the same yellow rays were blending with his 
undeviating wake. 

“Ha, ha, my ship ! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea- 
chariot of the sun. Ho,, ho ! all ye nations before my prow, I bring 
the sun to ye ! Yoke on the further billows ; hallo ! a tandem, I drive 
the sea !” 

But suddenly reigned back by some counter thought, he hurried 
towards the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading. 

“East-sou’-east, sir,” said the frightened steersman. 

“Thou liest!” smiting him with his clenched fist. “Heading east 
at this hour in the morning, and the sun astern ?” 

Upon this every soul was confounded ; for the phenomenon just then 
observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its 
very blinding palpableness must have been the cause. 

Thrusting his head half-way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one 
glimpse of the compass ; his uplifted arm slowly fell ; for a moment he 
almost seemed to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked, 
and lo ! the two compasses pointed east, and the Pequod was as infal- 
libly going west. 

But ere the first wild alarm could get out aboard among the crew, 
the old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, “I have it ! It has happened 
before. Mr. Starbuck, last night’s thunder turned our compasses — 
that’s all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it.” 

“Aye ; but never before has it happened to me, sir,” said the pale 
mate gloomily. 

Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more 


474 


MOBY DICK; OR 

than one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, 
as developed in the mariners’ needle, is, as all know, essentially one 
with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much mar- 
velled at, that such things should be. In instances where the light- 
ning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the spars 
and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more 
fatal; all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before 
magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife’s knitting needle. 
But in either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the orig- 
inal virtue thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be 
affected, the same fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship; 
even were the lowermost one inserted into the kelson. 

Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed 
compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took 
the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were ex- 
actly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship’s course to be changed 
accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod 
thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed 
fair one had only been juggling her. 

Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said 
nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and 
Flask — who in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his feel- 
ings — likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though 
some of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their 
fear of Fate. But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained 
almost wholly unimpressed ; or if impressed, it was only with a certain 
magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab’s. 

For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But 
chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper sight- 
tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck. 

“Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun’s pilot ! yesterday I wrecked 
thee, and to-day the compasses would feign have wrecked me. So, so. 
But Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck — a lance 
without a pole; top-maul, and the smallest of the sail-maker’s needles. 
Quick!” 

Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now 


475 


THE WHITE WHALE 

about to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have 
been to revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtle skill, in 
a matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the 
old man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though 
clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious 
sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents. 

“Men,” said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed 
him the things he had demanded, “my men, the thunder turned old 
Ahab’s needles ; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his 
own, that will point as true as any.” 

Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as 
this was said ; and with fascinated eyes they waited whatever magic 
might follow. But Starbuck looked away. 

With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of 
the lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, 
bade him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, 
with the maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, 
he placed the blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly 
hammered that, several times, the mate still holding the rod as before. 
Then going through some small strange motions with it — whether in- 
dispensable to the magnetising of the steel, or merely intended to aug- 
ment the awe of the crew, is uncertain — he called for linen thread ; and 
moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two reversed needles there, and 
horizontally suspended the sail-needle by its middle, over one of the 
compass-cards. At first, the steel went round and round, quivering and 
vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, 
who had been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly back 
from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it, ex- 
claimed, — “Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the level 
loadstone ! The sun is east, and that compass swears it !” 

One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes 
could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they 
slunk away. 

In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his 
fatal pride. 


476 


MOBY DICK; OR 

CHAPTER CXXIY 


THE LOG AND LINE 

While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, 
the log and line had but very seldom been in use. Owing to a con- 
. fident reliance upon other means of determining the vessel's place, 
some merchantmen, and many whalemen, especially when cruising, 
wholly neglect to heave the log;, though at the same time, and fre- 
quently more for form's sake than anything else, regularly putting 
down upon the customary slate the course steered by the ship, as well 
as the presumed average rate of progression every hour. It had been 
thus with the Pequod. The wooden reel and angular log attached 
hung, long untouched, just beneath the railing of the after bulwarks. 
Rains and spray had damped it ; sun and wind had warped it ; all the 
elements had combined to rot a thing that hung so idly. But heedless 
of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he happened to glance upon the 
reel, not many hours after the magnet scene, and he remembered how 
his quadrant was no more, and recalled his frantic oath about the level 
log and line. The ship was sailing plungingly; astern the billows 
rolled in riots. 

“Forward, there ! Heave the log !" 

Two seamen came. The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly 
Manxman. “Take the reel, one of ye, I'll heave." 

They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship's leeside, where the 
deck with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into 
the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea. 

The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up by the project- 
ing handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved, 
so stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced 
to him. 

Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or 
forty turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when 
the old Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, 
made bold to speak. 

“Sir, I mistrust it ; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have 
spoiled it,” 


477 


THE WHITE WHALE 

“ ’Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled 
thee? Thou seem’st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not 
thou it.” 

a I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these 
grey hairs of mine ’tis not worth while disputing, ’specially with a 
superior, who’ll ne’er confess.” 

“What’s that? There’s now a patched professor in Queen Nature’s 
granite-founded College; hut methinks he’s too subservient. Where 
wert thou bom ?” 

“In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir.” 

“Excellent ! Thou’st hit the world by that.” 

“I know not, sir, but I was horn there.” 

“In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way,, it’s good. Here’s 
a man from Man ; a man bom in once independent Man, and now un- 
manned of Man; which is sucked in — by what? Up with the reel! 
The dead, blind wall butts all inquiring heads at last. Up with it! 
So.” 

The log was heaved. The loose coils rapidly straightened out in long 
dragging line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In 
turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the tower- 
ing resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger strangely. 

“Hold hard!” 

Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon; the 
tugging log was gone. 

“I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the 
mad sea parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, 
in, Tahitian ; these lines run whole, and whirling out ! come in broken, 
Tahitian; reel up, Manxman. And look ye, let the carpenter make 
another log, and mend thou the line. See to it.” 

“There he goes now; to him nothing’s happened; but to me, the 
skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul 
in, Tahitian ; these lines run whole, and whirling out ! come in broken 
and dragging slow. Ha, Pip! come to help; eh, Pip?” 

“Pip ? whom call ye Pip ? Pip jumped from the whale boat. Pip’s 
missing. Let’s see now if we haven’t fished him up here, fishermen. 
It drags hard; I guess he’s holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti ! Jerk him 


478 


MOBY DICK; OR 

off ; we haul in no cowards here. Ho ! there’s his arm just breaking 
water. A hatchet ! a hatchet ! cut it off — we haul in no cowards here. 
Captain Ahab ! sir, sir ! here’s Pip, trying to get on board again.” 

“Peace, thou crazy loon,” cried the Manxman, seizing him by the 
arm. “Away from the quarter-deck !” 

“The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser,” muttered Ahab, advancing. 
“Hands off from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?” 

“Astern there, sir, astern! Lo, lo!” 

“And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant 
pupils of thy eyes. Oh God ! that man should be a thing for immortal 
souls to sieve through ! Who art thou, boy ?” 

“Bell-boy, sir; ship’s-crier ; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip! 
One hundred pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high — looks 
cowardly — quickest known by that! Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen 
Pip the coward ?” 

“There can be no hearts above the snowline. Oh, ye frozen heavens ! 
look down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned 
him, ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s 
home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touches my inmost centre, 
boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, 
let’s down.” 

“What’s this? here’s velvet sharkskin,” intently gazing at Ahab’s 
hand, and feeling it. “Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing 
as this, perhaps he had ne’er been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a 
man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old 
Perth now come and rivet these two hands together ; the black one with 
the white, for I will not let this go.” 

“Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse 
horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo ! ye believers in 
gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo, you ! see the omniscient gods 
oblivious of suffering man ; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not 
what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come ! 
I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped 
an Emperor’s!” 

“There go two daft ones now,” muttered the old Manxman. “One 
daft with strength, the other daft with weakness. But here’s the end 


479 


THE WHITE WHALE 

of the rotten line — all dripping too. Mend it, eh? I think we had 
best have a new line altogether. I’ll see Mr. Stubb about it.” 

CHAPTEE CXXV 

THE LIFEBUOY 

Steering now south-eastward by Ahab’s levelled steel, and her progress 
solely determined by Ahab’s level log and line ; the Pequod held on her 
path towards the equator. Making so long a passage through such 
unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, sideways im- 
pelled by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; all 
these seemed the strange calm things preluding some riotous and des- 
perate scene. 

At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the 
equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the 
dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets ; the watch — then headed 
by Flask— was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly — 
like half articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod’s murdered 
Innocents — that one and all, they started from their reveries, and for 
the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixedly listen- 
ing, like the carved Eoman slave, while that wild cry remained within 
hearing. The Christian or civilised part of the crew said it was mer- 
maids, and shuddered ; but the pagan harpooneers remained unap- 
palled. Yet the grey Manxman — the oldest mariner of all — declared 
that the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of 
newly drowned men in the sea. 

Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn, 
when he came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask 
not unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, 
and thus explained the wonder. 

Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great 
numbers of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or 
some dams that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and 
kept company with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort 
of wail. But this only the more affected some of them, because most 


480 


MOBY DICK; OR 

mariners cherish a very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not 
only from their peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the 
human look of their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peer- 
ingly uprising from the water alongside. In the sea, under certain 
circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken for men. 

But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most 
plausible confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morn- 
ing. At sunrise this man went from his hammock to his masthead at 
the fore; and whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his 
sleep (for sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether 
is was thus with the man, there is now no telling; but, be that as it 
may, he had not been long at his perch, when a cry was heard — 
a cry and a rushing — and looking up, they saw a falling phantom in 
the air; and looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in 
the blue of the sea. 

The lifebuoy — a long slender cask — was dropped from the stem, 
where it always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose 
to seize it, and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, 
so that it slowly filled, and the parched wood also filled at its every 
pore ; and the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the bottom, 
as if to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one. 

And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look 
out for the White Whale, on the White Whale’s own peculiar ground ; 
that man was swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps, thought of 
that at the time. Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at this 
event, at least as a portent ; for they regarded it, not as a foreshadowing 
of evil in the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already presaged. 
They declared that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks 
they had heard the night before. But again the old Manxman said 
nay. 

The lost lifebuoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed 
to see to it ; but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as 
in the feverish eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of the 
voyage, all hands were impatient of any toil but what was directly 
connected with its final end, whatever that might prove to be ; therefore, 
they were going to leave the ship’s stem unprovided with a buoy, when 


THE WHITE WHALE isi 

by certain strange signs and innuendoes Queequeg hinted a hint con- 
cerning his coffin. 

“A lifebuoy of a coffin !” cried Starbuck, staring. 

“Rather queer, that, I should say,” said Stubb. 

It will make a good enough one,” said Flask, “the carpenter here 
can arrange it easily.” 

“Bring it up; there’s nothing else for it,” said Starbuck, after a 
melancholy pause. “Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me so — the 
coffin, I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig it.” 

“And shall I nail down the lid, sir ?” moving his hand as with a 
hammer. 

“Aye.” 

“And shall I caulk the seams, sir?” moving his hand as with a 
caulking-iron. 

“Aye.” 

“And shall I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?” moving hrs 
hand as with a pitch-pot. 

“Away ! what possesses thee to this ? Make a lifebuoy of 
the coffin, and no more — Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with 
me.” 

“He goes off in a huff. The whole he can endure; at the parts he 
baulks. How I don’t like this. I make a leg for Captain Ahab, and 
he wears it like a gentleman ; but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and 
he won’t put his head into it. Are all my pains to go for nothing with 
that coffin? And now I’m ordered to make a lifebuoy of it. It’s 
like turning an old coat; going to bring the flesh on the other side 
now. I don’t like this cobbling sort of business — I don’t like it at 
all; it’s undignified; it’s not my place. Let tinkers’ brats do tinker- 
ings; we are their betters. I like to take in hand none but clean, 
Virgin, fair-and-square mathematical jobs, something that regularly 
begins at the beginning, and is at the middle when midway, and 
comes to an end at the conclusion ; not a cobbler’s job, that’s at an end 
in the middle, and at the beginning at the end. It’s the old woman’s 
tricks to be giving cobbling jobs. Lord! what an affection all old 
women have for tinkers. I know an old woman of sixty-five who ran 
away with a bald-headed young tinker once. And that’s the reason 


482 


MOBY DICK; OR 

I never would work for lonely widow old women ashore, when I kept 
my job-shop in the Vineyard ; they might have taken it into their lonely 
old heads to run off with me. But heigh-ho ! there are no caps at sea 
but snow-caps. Let me see. Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; pay 
over the same with pitch; batten them down tight, and hang it with 
the snap-spring over the ship’s stern. Were ever such things done 
before with a coffin ? Some superstitious old carpenters, now, would he 
tied up in the rigging, ere they would do the job. But I’m made of 
knotty Aroostook hemlock; I don’t budge. Cruppered with a coffin! 
Sailing about with a grave-yard tray ! But never mind. We workers 
in woods made bridal-bedsteads and card-tables, as well as coffins and 
hearses. We work by the month, or by the job, or by the profit; 
not for us to ask the why and wherefore of our work, unless it he too 
coufounded cobbling, and then we stash it if we can. Hem! I’ll do 
the job, now, tenderly. I’ll have me — let’s see — how many in the 
ship’s company, all told? But I’ve forgotten. Anyway, I’ll have 
me thirty separate, Turk’s-headed life-lines, each three feet long hang- 
ing all round to the coffin. Then, if the hull go down, there’ll be 
thirty lively fellows all fighting for one coffin, a sight not seen very 
often beneath the sun! Come hammer, caulking-iron, pitch-pot and 
marling-spike ! Let’s to it.” 


CHAPTER CXXVI 

THE DECK 

{The coffin laid upon two line-tubs, between the bench-vice and the open 
hatchway ; the Carpenter caulking its seams ; the string of twisted oakum 
slowly unwinding from a large roll of it placed in the bosom of his 
frock — Ahab comes slowly from the cabin-gangway , and hears Pip 
following him.) 

“Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this 
hand complies with my humour more genially than that boy. — Middle 
aisle of a church ! What’s here ?” 

“Lifebuoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck’s orders. Oh, look, sir! Beware 
the hatchway!” 


483 


THE WHITE WHALE 

“Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault.” 

“Sir ? The hatchway ? oh ! So it does, sir, so it does.” 

Art not thou the leg-maker ? Look, did not this stump come from 
thy shop ?” 

“I believe it did, sir ; does the ferrule stand, sir ?” 

“Well enough. But art thou not also the undertaker?” 

“Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; 
but they’ve set me now to turning it into something else.” 

“Then tell me ; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, inter-meddling, 
monopolising, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and 
the next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again lifebuoys out of 
those same coffins ? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much 
of a J ack-of-all-trades.” 

“But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do.” 

“The gods again. Hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about 
a coffin? The Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out 
the craters for volcanoes ; and the gravedigger in the play sings, spade 
in hand. Dost thou never ?” 

“Sing, sir? Do I sing? Oh, I’m indifferent enough, sir, for that; 
but the reason why the gravedigger made music must have been be- 
cause there was none in his spade, sir. But the caulking mallet is 
full of it. Hark to it.” 

“Aye, and that’s because the lid there’s a sounding-board; and what 
in all things makes the sounding-board is this — there’s naught beneath. 
And yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty much the same, Car- 
penter. Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the coffin knock 
against the churchyard gate going in?” 

“Faith, sir, I’ve ” 

“Faith ? What’s that ?” 

“Why, faith, sir, it’s only a sort of exclamation-like — that’s all, 
sir.” 

“Um, um ; go on.” 

“I was about to say, sir, that ” 

“Art thou a silkworm ? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thy- 
self? Look at thy bosom! Dispatch! and get these traps out of 
sight.” 


484 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“He goes aft. That was sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in 
hot latitudes. I’ve heard of the Isle of Albemarle, one of the Galli- 
pagos, is cut by the Equator right in the middle. Seems to me some 
sort of Equator cuts yon old man, too, right, in his middle. He’s 
always under the Line — fiery hot, I tell ye! He’s looking this way 
— come, oakum; quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is 
the cork, and I’m the professor of musical glasses — -tap, tap 1” 

Ahab (to himself ). 

“There’s a sight! There’s a sound! The grey-headed woodpecker 
tapping the hollow tree ! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. 
See! that thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most 
malicious way, that fellow. Rat-tat! So man’s seconds tick! Oh! 
how immaterial are all materials! What things real are there, but 
imponderable thoughts ? Here now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim 
death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope 
of most endangered life. A lifebuoy of a coffin. Does it go further? 
Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an 
immortality-preserver ! I’ll think of that. But no. So far gone 
am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright 
one, seems but uncertain twilight to me. Will ye never have done, 
Carpenter, with that accursed sound? I go below; let me not see 
that thing here when I return again. How, then, Pip, we’ll talk 
this over; I do such most wondrous philosophies from thee! Some 
unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must empty into thee !” 


CHAPTER CXXVII 

THE PEQUOD MEETS THE RACHEL 

Next day, a large ship, the Rachel , was descried, bearing directly 
down upon the Pequod, all her spars thickly clustering with men. At 
the time the Pequod was making good speed through the water ; but as 
the broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh to her, the boastful 
sails all fell together as blank bladders that are burst, and all life fled 
from the smitten hull. 


485 


THE WHITE WHALE 

Bad news, she brings bad news,” muttered the old Manxman; but 
ere her commander, who, with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat ; 
ere he could hopefully hail, Ahab’s voice was heard. 

“Hast seen the White Whale ?” 

“Ay e > yesterday. Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift ?” 

Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected ques- 
tion; and would then have fain boarded the stranger, when the stran- 
ger Captain himself, having stopped his vessel’s way, was seen descend- 
ing her side. A few keen pulls, and his boat-hook soon clinched the 
Pequod s mainchains, and he sprang to the deck. Immediately he 
was recognised by Ahab for a Nantucketer he knew. But no formal 
salutation was exchanged. 

“Where was he? — not killed! — not killed!” cried Ahab, closely ad- 
vancing. “How was it ?” 

It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous, 
while three of the stranger’s boats were engaged with a shoal of whales, 
which had led them some four or five miles from the ship ; and while they 
were yet in swift chase to windward, the white hump and head of Moby 
Dick had suddenly loomed up out of the blue water, not very far to 
leeward ; whereupon, the fourth rigged boat — a reserved one — had been 
instantly lowered in chase. After a keen sail before the wind, this 
fourth boat — the swiftest keeled of all — seemed to have succeeded in 
fastening (at least, as well as a man at the masthead could tell any- 
thing about it). In the distance he saw the diminished dotted boat; 
and then a swift gleam of bubbling white water ; and after that nothing 
more; whence it was concluded that the stricken whale must have in- 
definitely run away with his pursuers, as often happens. There was 
some apprehension, but no positive alarm, as yet. The recall signals 
were placed in the rigging; darkness came on; and forced to pick up 
her three far to windward boats — ere going in quest of the fourth one 
in the precisely opposite direction — the ship had not only been neces- 
sitated to leave that boat to its fate till near midnight, but for the time, 
to increase her distance from it. But the rest of her crew being at last 
safe aboard, she crowded all sail — stunsail on stunsail — after the 
missing boat; kindling a fire in her try-pots for a beacon; and every 
man aloft on the lookout. But though when she had thus sailed a 
sufficient distance to gain the presumed place of the absent ones when 


486 


MOBY DICK; OR 

last seen — though she then paused to lower her spare boats to pull all 
around her; and not finding anything, had again dashed on; again 
paused, and lowered her boats; and though she had thus continued 
doing till daylight; yet not the least glimpse of the missing keel had 
been seen. 

The story told, the stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal 
his object in boarding the Pequod. He desired that ship to unite with 
his own in the search; by sailing over the sea some four or five miles 
apart, on parallel lines,, and so sweeping a double horizon, as it were. 

“I will wager something now,” whispered Stubb to Flask, “that some 
one in that missing boat wore off that Captain’s best coat ; mayhap, his 
watch — he’s so cursed anxious to get it back. Who ever heard of two 
pious whale ships cruising after one missing whale-boat in the height 
of the whaling season ? See, Flask, only see how pale he looks — pale 
in the very buttons of his eyes — look — it wasn’t the coat — it must have 
been the ” 

“My boy, my own boy is among them. For God’s sake — I beg, I 
conjure” — here exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab, who thus far 
had but icily received his ‘petition. “For eight-and-forty hours let 
me charter your ship — I will gladly pay for it,, and roundly pay for it 
— if there be no other way — for eight-and-forty hours only — only that 
— you must, oh, you must, and you shall do this thing.” 

“His son !” cried Stubb, “oh, it’s his son he’s lost ! I take back the 
coat and watch — what says Ahab ? We must save that boy.” 

“He’s drowned with the rest on ’em, last night,” said the old 
Manx sailor standing behind them; “I heard; all of ye heard their 
spirits.” 

Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel's 
the more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of the 
Captain’s sons among the number of the missing boat’s crew; but 
among the number of the other boats’ crews at the same time, but on 
the other hand, separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes 
of the chase, there had been still another son; as that for a time, the 
wretched father was plunged to the bottom of the cruellest perplexity ; 
which was only solved for him by his chief mate’s instinctively adopting 
the ordinary procedure of a whale ship in such emergencies, that is, 


487 


THE WHITE WHALE 

when placed between jeopardised but divided boats, always to pick up 
the majority first. But the Captain, for some unknown constitutional 
reason, had refrained from mentioning all this, and not till forced to it 
by Ahab’s iciness did he allude to his one yet missing boy ; a little lad, 
but twelve years old, whose father with the earnest but unmisgiving 
hardihood of a Nantucketer’s paternal love, had thus early sought to 
initiate him in the perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemori- 
ally the destiny of all his race. Nor does it unfrequently occur, that 
Nantucket captains will send a son of such tender age away from them 
for a protracted three or four years’ voyage in some other ship than 
their own : so that their first knowledge of a whaleman’s career shall be 
unenervated by any chance display of a father’s natural but untimely 
partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern. 

Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of 
Ahab; and Ahab still stood like an anvil receiving every shock, but 
without the least quivering of his own. 

“I will not go,” said the stranger, “till you say aye to me. Do to 
me as you would have me do to you in the like case. For you too have 
a boy, Captain Ahab — though but a child, and nestling safely at home 
now — a child of your old age too. — Yes, yes, you relent; I see it — 
run, run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards.” 

“Avast,” cried Ahab — “touch not a rope-yarn” ; then in a voice that 
prolongingly moulded every word — “Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. 
Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and 
may I forgive myself, but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the bin- 
nacle watch, and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all 
strangers: then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before.” 

Hurriedly turning with averted face, he descended into his cabin, 
leaving the strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter 
rejection of his so earnest suit. But starting from his enchantment, 
Gardiner silently hurried to the side ; more fell than stepped into his 
boat, and returned to his ship. 

Soon the two ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange 
vessel was in view, she was seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark 
spot, however small, on the sea. This way and that her yards were 
swung round; starboard and larboard, she continued to tack; now 


488 


MOBY DICK; OR 

she beat against a head sea ; and again it pushed her before it ; yet all 
the while, her masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as 
three tall cherry trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs. 

But by her still halting course and winding, woful way, you plainly 
saw that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without com- 
fort. She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were 
not. 


CHAPTER CXXVIII 

THE CABItf 

( Ahab moving to go on deck; Pip catches him by the hand to follow.) 

“Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour 
is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have 
thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing 
to my malady. Like cures like ; and for this hunt, my malady becomes 
my most desired health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall 
serve thee, as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in 
my own screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be.” 

“Ho, no, no ! ye have not a whole body, sir ; do ye but use poor me 
for your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I 
remain a part of ye.” 

“Oh ! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless 
fidelity of man! — and a black! and crazy! — but methinks like cures 
like applies to him too ; he grows so sane again.” 

“They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose 
drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin. 
But I will never desert ye* sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with 
ye.” 

“If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up 
in him. I tell thee no ; it cannot be.” 

“Oh, good master, master, master !” 

“Weep so, and I will murder thee ! have a care, for Ahab too is mad. 
Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck and still 
know that I am here. And now I quit thee. Thy hand — Met! 
True art thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre. So: God for 


THE WHITE WHALE 489 

ever bless tliee ; and if it come to that, — God for ever save thee, let what 
will befall.” 


( Ahab goes ; Pip steps one step forward.) 

Here he this instant stood; I stand in his air, — but I’m alone. 
How were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he’s missing. 
Pip! Pip! Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip? He must be up 
here ; let’s try the door. What ? neither lock nor bolt nor bar ; and 
yet there’s no opening it. It must be the spell; he told me to stay 
here. Aye, and told me this screwed chair was mine. Here, then, 
I’ll seat me against the transom, in the ship’s full middle all her keel 
and her three masts before me. Here, our old sailors say, in their 
black seventy-fours great admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it 
over rows of captains and lieutenants. Ha! what’s this? epaulets! 
epaulets! the epaulets all come crowding! Pass round the decanters; 
glad to see ye; fill up, monsieurs! What an old feeling, now, when 
a black boy’s host to white men with gold lace upon their coats ! — 
Monsieurs, have you seen one Pip ? — a little negro lad, five feet high, 
hang-dog look, and cowardly! Jumped from a whale boat once; — seen 
him? Ho! Well then, fill up again, captains, and let’s drink shame 
upon all cowards ! I name no names. Shame upon them ! Put one 
foot upon the table. Shame upon all cowards — Hist! above there, I 
hear ivory — Oh, master ! master ! I am indeed down-hearted when you 
walk over me. But here I’ll stay though this stem strikes rocks ; and 
they bulge through, and oysters come to join me.” 


CHAPTER CXXIX 

THE HAT 

And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a 
preliminary cruise, Ahab, — all other whaling waters swept — seemed 
to have chased his foe into an ocean-fold,, to slay him the more securely 
there ; now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and longi- 
tude where his tormenting wound had been inflicted ; now that a vessel 
had been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually encoun- 


490 


MOBY DICK; OR 

tered Moby Dick ; — and now that all his successive meetings with vari- 
ous ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference with 
which the White Whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned 
against ; now it was that there lurked a something in the old man’s eyes, 
which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the unsetting 
polar star which through the livelong, arctic, six months’ night sustains 
its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab’s purpose now fixedly 
gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It 
domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings, 
fears, were fain to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a 
single spear or leaf. 

In this foreshadowing interval too, all humour, forced or natural, 
vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more 
strove to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed 
ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped 
mortar of Ahab’s iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved 
about the deck, ever conscious that the old man’s despot eye was on 
them. 

But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours ; 
when he thought no glance but one was on him ; then you would have 
seen that even as Ahab’s eyes so awed the crew’s, the inscrutable Par- 
see’s glance awed his ; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times 
affected it. Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the 
thin Fedallah now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men 
looked dubious at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed 
he were a mortal substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the 
deck by some unseen being’s body. And that shadow was always hover- 
ing there. For not by night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been 
known to slumber, or go below. He would stand still for hours: but 
never sat or leaned ; his wan but wondrous eyes did plainly say, “We 
two watchmen never rest.” 

Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon 
the deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot- 
hole, or exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating limits, — the 
mainmast and the mizzen; or else they saw him standing in the cabin- 
scuttle, — his living foot advanced upon the deck, as if to step ; his hat 
slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless he stood, 


491 


THE WHITE WHALE 

however the days and nights were added on, that he had not swung in 
his hammock ; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never 
tell unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at times : 
or whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter, though he 
stood so in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded 
night-damp gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and 
hat. The clothes that the night had wet, the next day’s sunshine dried 
upon him ; and so, day after day, and night after night ; he went no 
more beneath the planks ; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing 
he sent for. 

He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals, — breakfast 
and dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which 
darkly grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which 
still grow idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure. 
But though his whole life was now become one watch on deck; and 
though the Parsee’s mystic watch was without intermission as his own; 
yet these two never seemed to speak — one man to the other — unless at 
long intervals some passing unmomentous matter made it necessary. 
Though such a potent spell seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, 
and to the awe-struck crew, they seemed pole-like asunder. If by 
day they chanced to speak one word; by night, dumb men were both, 
so far as concerned the slightest verbal interchange. At times, for 
longest hours, without a single hail, they stood far parted in the star- 
light ; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast ; but still fixedly 
gazing upon each other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown 
shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned substance. 

And yet, somehow, did Ahab — in his own proper self, as daily, 
hourly, and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates, 
— Ahab seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still 
again both seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them ; 
the lean shade siding the solid rib. For.be this Parsee what he may, 
all rib and keel was solid Ahab. At the first faintest glimmering of 
the dawn, his iron voice was heard from aft — “Man the mastheads !” 
— and all through the day, till after sunset and after twilight, the same 
voice every hour, at the striking of the helmsman’s bell,, was heard — 
“What d’ye see? — sharp! sharp!” 

But when three or four days had glided by, after meeting the chil- 


492 


MOBY DICK; OR 

dren-seeking Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen ; the monomaniac 
old man seemed distrustful of his crew’s fidelity ; at least, of nearly all 
except the pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether 
Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But 
if these suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from 
verbally expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint 
them. 

“I will have the first sight of the whale myself,” — he said. “Aye! 
Ahab must have the doubloon!” and with his own hands he rigged a 
nest of basketed bowlines; and sending a hand aloft, with a single 
sheaved block, to secure to the mainmast head, he received the two 
ends of the downward-reeved rope; and attaching one to his basket, 
prepared a pin for the other end, in order to fasten it at the rail. This 
done, with that end yet in his hand, and standing beside the pin, he 
looked round upon his crew, sweeping from one to the other; pausing 
his glance long upon Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning 
Fedallah ; and then settling his firm relying eye upon the chief mate, 
said — “Take the rope, sir — I give it into thy hands, Starbuck.” 
Then arranging his person in the basket, he gave the word for them to 
hoist him to his perch, Starbuck being the one who secured the rope 
at last ; and afterwards stood near it. And thus, with one hand cling- 
ing round the royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad upon the sea for miles 
and miles, — ahead, astern, this side, and that, — within the wide ex- 
panded circle commanded at so great a height. 

When in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place 
in the rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea 
is hoisted up to that spot, and sustained there by the rope ; under these 
circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given in strict 
charge to some one man who has the special watch of it. Because in 
such a wilderness of running rigging, whose various different relations 
aloft cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them a 
the deck; and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few 
minutes cast down from the fastenings, it would be but a natural fatal- 
ity, if unprovided with a constant watchman, the hoisted sailor should 
by some carelessness of the crew be cast adrift and fall all swooping to 
the sea. So Ahab’s proceedings in this matter were not unusual; the 
only strange thing about them seemed to be, that Starbuck, almost the 


493 


THE WHITE WHALE 

one only man who had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in the 
slightest degree approaching to decision — one of those too, whose faith- 
fulness on the lookout he had seemed to doubt somewhat; — it was 
strange, that this was the very man he should select for his watchman ; 
freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person’s 
hand. 

Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there 
ten minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often 
fly incommodiously close round the manned mastheads of whalemen 
in these latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming 
round his head in a maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it 
darted a thousand feet straight up into the air; then spiralised down- 
wards, and went eddying again round his head. 

But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab 
seemed not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would anyone else 
have marked it much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now 
almost the least heedful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning 
in almost every sight. 

“Your hat, your hat, sir !” suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who 
being posted at the mizzen-masthead, stood directly behind Ahab, 
though somewhat lower than his level, and with a deep gulf of air 
dividing them. 

But already the sable wing was before the old man’s eyes ; the long 
hooked hill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away 
with his prize. 


CHAPTER CXXX 

THE PEQUOD MEETS THE DELIGHT 

The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; 
the lifebuoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miser- 
ably misnamed the Delight, was descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes 
were fixed upon her broad beams, called shears, which, in some whaling- 
ships, cross the quarterdeck at the height of eight or nine feet; serv- 
ing to carry the spare, unrigged, or disabled boats. 

Upon the stranger’s shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, 


494 


MOBY DICK; OR 

and some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale- 
boat; but you now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see 
through the peeled, half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a 
horse. 

“Hast seen the White Whale V 9 

“Look!” replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and 
with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck. 

“Hast killed him V 9 

“The harpoon is not yet forged that will ever do that,” answered 
the other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, 
whose gathered sides some noiseless sailors were busy in sewing to- 
gether. 

“Hot forged!” and snatching Perth’s levelled iron from the crotch, 
Ahab held it out, exclaiming — “Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this 
hand I hold his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by light- 
ning are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot 
place behind the fin, where the White Whale most feels his accursed 
life!” 

“Then God keep thee, old man — see’st thou that” — pointing to the 
hammock — “I bury but one of five stout men who were alive only 
yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only that one I bury; the rest 
were buried before they died ; you sail upon their tomb.” Then turn- 
ing to his crew — “Are ye ready there? place the plank then on the 
rail, and lift the body; so, then — Oh! God! — advancing towards the 

hammock with uplifted hands “may the resurrection and the 

life ” 

“Brace forward ! Up helm !” cried Ahab like lightning to his men. 

But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape 
the sound of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea ; 
not so quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have 
sprinkled her hull with their ghostly baptism. 

As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange 
lifebuoy hanging at the Pequod’s stern came into conspicuous 
relief. 

“Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!” cried a foreboding voice in her 
wake. “In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly from our sad burial. Ye but 
turn us your taffrail to show us your coffin!” 


THE WHITE WHALE 

CHAPTER CXXXI 


495 


THE SYMPHONY 

It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were 
hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air 
was transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust 
and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s 
chest in his sleep. 

Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small, 
unspeckled birds ; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air ; 
but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed 
mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks ; and these were the strong, 
troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea. 

But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades 
and shadows without ; those two seemed one ; it was only the sex, as it 
were, that distinguished them. 

Tied up and twisted, gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly 
firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in 
the ashes of ruin ; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the 
morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s fore- 
head of heaven. 

Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side, 
and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, 
the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But 
the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for 
a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that 
winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the stepmother world, 
so long cruel — forbidding — now threw affectionate arms round his 
stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, 
that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save 
and to bless-. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear 
into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one 
wee drop. 

Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over 
the side ; and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless 
sobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful 


496 MOBY DICK; OR 

not to touch him, or he noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and 
stood there. 

Ahah turned. 

“Starbuck !” 

“Sir.'” 

a Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. 
On such a day — very much such a sweetness as this — I struck my 
first whale — a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty — forty — forty 
years ago! — ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of 
privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! 
for forty years has Ahah forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years 
to make war on the horrors of the deep ! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out 
of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of 
this life I have led ; the desolation of solitude it has been ; the masoned, 
walled-town of a Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small en- 
trance to any sympathy from the green country without — oh, weari- 
ness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! — when I 
think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me be- 
fore — and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare — fit 
emblem of the dry nourishment of my soil ! — when the poorest lands- 
man has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s 

fresh bread to my mouldy crusts away, whole oceans away, from 

that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the 
next day, leaving hut one dent in my marriage pillow — wife ? wife ? — 
rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor 
girl when I married her, Starbuck ; and then, the madness, the frenzy, 
the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand 
lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly, chased his prey — more 
a demon than- a man ? — aye, aye ! what a forty years’ fool — fool — old 
fool, has old Ahab been ! Why this strife of the chase ? why weary and 
palsy the arms at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer 
or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that 
with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched 
from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that 
I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some 
ashes ! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck ? I feel 


497 


THE WHITE WHALE 

deadly faint, bowed, and bumped, as though I were Adam, staggering 
beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God! — crack 
my heart ! — stave my brain ! — mockery ! mockery ! bitter, biting mock- 
ery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and 
feel thus intolerably old ? Close ! stand close to me, Starbuck ; let me 
look into a human eye ; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky ; better 
than to gaze upon God. By the green land ; by the bright hearthstone ! 
this is the magic glass, man ; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. 
No, no; stay on board, on board! — lower not when I do; when branded 
Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, 
no ! not with the far-away home I see in that eye !” 

“Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after 
all ! why should any one give chase to that hated fish ! Away with me ! 
let us fly these deadly waters ! let us home ! Wife and child, too, are 
Starbuck’s — wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, playfellow 
youth ; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, 
paternal old age ! Away ! let us away ! — this instant let me alter the 
course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we 
bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have 
some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.” 

“They have, they have. I have seen them — some summer days in 
the morning. About this time — yes, it is his noon nap now — the boy 
vivaciously wakes ; sits up in bed ; and his mother tells him of me, of 
cannibal old me; how I am aboard upon the deep, but will yet come 
back to dance him again.” 

“ ’Tis my Mary, my Mary herself ! She promised that my boy, 
every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse 
of his father’s sail ! Yes, yes ! no more ! it is done! we head for Nan- 
tucket! Come, my Captain, study out the course, and let us away! 
See, see ! the boy’s face from the window ! the boy’s hand on the hill !” 

But Ahab’s glance was averted ; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, 
and cast his last cindered apple to the soil. 

“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it ; what 
cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor com- 
mands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep 
pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly 


498 


MOBY DICK; OR 

making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I 
durst not so much as dare ? Is Ahab, Ahab ? Is it I, God, or who, that 
lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as 
an errand-boy in heaven ; nor one single star can revolve, but by some 
invisible power ; how then can this one small heart beat ; this one small 
brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that think- 
ing, does that living, and not I ? By heaven, man, we are turned round 
and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the hand- 
spike. And all the time, lo ! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea ! 
Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that 
flying-fish ? Where do murderers go, man ? Who’s to doom, when the 
judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, 
and a mild-looking sky ; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far- 
away meadow ; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes 
of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new- 
mown hay. Sleeping ? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last 
on the field. Sleep ? Aye, and rust amid greenness ; as last year’s 
scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swathes — Starbuck!” 

But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the mate had stolen 
away. 

Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started 
at two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motion- 
lessly leaning over the same rail. 


CHAPTER CXXXII 

THE CHASE FIRST DAY 

That night, in the mid-watch, when the old man — as his wont at 
intervals — stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and went 
to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing 
up the sea air as a sagacious ship’s dog will, in drawing nigh to some 
barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that 
peculiar odour, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the 
living Sperm Whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any 
mariner surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the 


499 


THE WHITE WHALE 

dog-vaiie, and then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odour as 
nearly as possible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship’s course to be slightly 
altered, and the sail to be shortened. 

The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindi- 
cated at daybreak by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly 
and lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated 
watery wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some 
swift tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream. 

“Man the mastheads! Call all hands!” 

Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the fore- 
castle deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that 
they seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they 
appear with their clothes in their hands. 

“What d’ye see?” cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky. 

“Nothing, nothing, sir!” was the sound hailing down in reply. 

“T’gallant-sails ! stunsails alow and aloft, and on both sides!” 

All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for sway- 
ing him to the mainroyal masthead ; and’ in a few moments they were 
hoisting him thither, when, while, but two-thirds of the way aloft, 
and while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the 
ma intopsail and topgallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the air, 
“There she blows! — there she blows! A hump like a snowhill! It 
is Moby Dick !” 

Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the 
three lookouts, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the 
famous whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained 
his final perch, some feet above the other lookouts, Tashtego standing 
just beneath him on the cap of the top-gallant-mast, so that the In- 
dian’s head was almost on a level with Ahab’s heel. From this 
height the whale was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll 
of the sea revealing his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his 
silent spout into the air. To the credulous mariners it seemed the 
same silent spout they had so long ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic 
and Indian Oceans. 

“And did none of ye see it before?” cried Ahab, hailing the 
perched men all around him. 


500 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“I saw him almost the same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I 
cried out,” said Tashtego. 

“Hot the same instant; not the same — no, the doubloon is mine, 
Fate reserved the doubloon for me. I only; none of ye could have 
raised the White Whale first. There she blows ! there she blows ! — there 
she blows! There again! — there again!” he cried, in long-drawn, 
lingering, methodic tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the 
whale’s visible jets. “He’s going to sound ! In stunsails ! Down top- 
gallant-sails ! Stand by three boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay 
on board, and keep the ship. Helm there ! Luff, luff a point ! So ; 
steady, man, steady! There go flukes! Ho, no; only black water! 
All ready the boats there ? Stand by, stand by ! Lower me, Mr. Star- 
buck; lower, lower, — quick, quicker!” and he slid through the air to 
the deck. 

“He is heading straight to leeward, sir,” cried Stubb ; “right away 
from us ; cannot have seen the ship yet.” 

“Be dumb, man ! Stand by the braces ! Hard down the helm ! — 
brace up ! Shiver her ! — shiver her ! So ; well that ! Boats, boats !” 

Soon all the boats but Starbuck’s were dropped ; all the boat-sails set 
— all the padciles plying ; with rippling swiftness, shooting to leeward ; 
and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, death-glimmer lit up Fedallah’s 
sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth. 

Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea ; 
but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean 
grew still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; 
seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breath- 
less hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his en- 
tire dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an 
isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, 
greenish foam. He saw the vast involved wrinkles of the slightly pro- 
jecting head beyond. Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged 
waters, went the glistening white shadows from his broad, milky fore- 
head, a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade ; and behind, 
the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of 
his steady wake ; and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by 
his side. But these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of 


501 


THE WHITE WHALE 

gay fowl softly feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and 
like to some flagstaff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall 
but, shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale’s 
back; and at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and 
to and fro skimming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched 
and rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers streaming like pen- 
nons. 

A gentle joyousness — a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, in- 
vested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away 
with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns ; his lovely, leering 
eyes sideways intent upon the maid ; with smooth bewitching fleetness, 
rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove did surpass 
the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam. 

On each soft side — coincident with the parted swell, that but once 
laving him, then flowed so wide away — on each bright side, the whale 
shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters 
"who namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity had ven- 
tured to assail it ; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture 
of tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale ! thou glidest on, to 
all who for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same 
way thou may’st have be juggled and destroyed before. 

And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, among 
waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, 
Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of 
his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wretched hideousness of his 
jaw. But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for 
an instant his whole marbleised body formed a high arch, like Vir- 
ginia’s Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in 
the air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight. 
Hoveringty halting, and dipping on the wing, the white sea-fowls long- 
ingly lingered over the agitated pool that he left. 

With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails 
adrift, the three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick’s ap- 
pearance. 

“An hour,” said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat’s stern, and he 
gazed beyond the whale’s place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide 


502 


MOBY DICK; OR 

wooing vacancies to leeward. It was only an instant; for again his 
eyes seemed whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle. 
The breeze now freshened ; the sea began to swell. 

“Th.e birds ! — the birds !” cried Tashtego. 

In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were 
now all flying towards Ahab’s boat ; and when within a few yards began 
fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous, 
expectant cries. Their vision was keener than man’s ; Ahab could dis- 
cover no sign in the sea. But suddenly as he peered down and into its 
depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white 
weasel, with a wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, 
till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked 
rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable 
bottom. It was Moby Dick’s open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast, 
shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea. The glitter- 
ing mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble tomb; 
and giving one sidelong sweep with his steering oar, Ahab whirled 
the craft aside from this tremendous apparition. Then, calling upon 
Fedallah to change places with him, went forward to the bows, and 
seizing Perth’s harpoon, commanded his crew to grasp their oars and 
stand by to stem. 

How, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its 
axis, its bow, by anticipation, was made to face the whale’s head while 
yet under water. But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, 
with that malicious intelligence ascribed to him, sidelingly trans- 
planted himself, as it were, in an instant, shooting his plaited head 
lengthwise beneath the boat. 

Through and through ; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled 
for an instant, the whale obliquely lying on his back, in the manner of 
a biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its bows full within his 
mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into 
the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a rowlock. The bluish pearl- 
white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab’s head, 
and reached higher than that. In this attitude the White Whale now 
shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With un- 
astonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the tiger- 


THE WHITE WHALE 503 

yellow crew were tumbling over each other’s head to gain the utter- 
most stern. 

And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, 
as the whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and 
from his body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be darted 
at from the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were ; 
and while the other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis 
impossible to withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious 
with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and 
helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized 
the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from 
its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him ; the 
frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an 
enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain, 
and locked themselves fast again in the sea, midway between the two 
floating wrecks. These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the 
crew at the stern- wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold 
fast to the oars to lash them across. 

At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the 
first, to perceive the whale’s intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, 
a movement that loosed his hold for the time ; at that moment his hand 
had made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite. But only 
slipping further into the whale’s mouth, and tilting over sideways as it 
slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw; spilled him out 
of it, as he leaned to the push ; and so he fell flat-faced upon the sea. 

Kipplinglv withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little 
distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down in 
the billows ; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole splendid 
body; so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose — some twenty or 
more feet out of the water — the now rising swells, with all their con- 
fluent waves, dazzling’ broke against it ; vindictively tossing their shiv- 
ered spray still higher into the air. 1 So, in a gale, the but half baffled 

1 This motion is peculiar to the Sperm whale. It receives its designa- 
tion (pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down 
poise of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously de- 
scribed. By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively 
yi$w whatever objects may be encircling him, 


504 


MOBY DICK; OR 

Channel billows only recoil from the base of the Eddystone, tri- 
umphantly to overlap its summit with their scud. 

But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly 
round and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in 
his vengeful wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more 
deadly assault. The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden 
him, as the blood of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus’s 
elephants in the book of Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered 
in the foam of the whale’s insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to 
swim, — though he could still keep afloat, even in the heart of such a 
whirlpool as that; helpless Ahab’s head was seen, like a tossed bubble 
which the least chance shock might burst. From the boat’s frag- 
mentary stern, Fedallah incuriously and mildly eyed him; the cling- 
ing crew, at the other drifting end, could not succour him ; more than 
enough was it for them to look to themselves. For so revolvingly 
appalling was the White Whale’s aspect, and so planetarily swift the 
ever-contracting circles he made, that he seemed horizontally swooping 
upon them. And though the other boats, unharmed, still hovered hard 
by, still they dared not pull into the eddy to strike, lest that should 
be the signal for the instant destruction of the jeopardised castaways, 
Ahab and all; nor in that case could they themselves hope to escape. 
With straining eyes, then they remained on the outer edge of the dire- 
ful zone, whose centre had now become the old man’s head. 

Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the 
ship’s mastheads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon 
the scene ; and was now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her ; — 
“Sail on the” — but that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from 
Moby Dick, and whelmed him for the time. But struggling out of it 
again, and chancing to rise on a towering crest, he shouted, — “Sail on 
the whale ! — Drive him off !” 

The Pequod’s prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed 
circle, she effectually parted the White Whale from his victim. As 
he sullenly swam off, the boats flew to the rescue. 

Dragged into Stubb’s boat with bloodshot, blinded eyes, the white 
brine caking in his wrinkles ; the long tension of Ahab’s bodily strength 
did crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body’s doom: for a 


THE WHITE WHALE 505 

time, lying all crushed in the bottom of Stubb’s boat, like one trodden 
under foot of herds of elephants. F ar inland, nameless wails came from 
him, as desolate sounds from out ravines. 

But this intensity of his physical prostration did hut so much the 
more abbreviate it. In an instant’s compass, great hearts sometimes 
condense to one deep pang, the sum-total of those shallow pains kindly 
diffused through feebler men’s whole lives. And so, such hearts, 
though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in 
their lifetime aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instan- 
taneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble 
natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls. 

“The harpoon,” said Ahab,. half-way rising, and draggingly lean- 
ing on one bended arm — “is it safe ?” 

“ A y e > s i r ? ^ or it was not darted; this is it,” said Stubb, showing it. 

“Lay it before me ; — any missing men ?” 

“One, two, three, four, five ; — there were five oars, sir, and here are 
five men.” 

“That’s good. — Help me, man ; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him ! 
there ! there ! going to leeward still ; what a leaping spout !— Hands off 
from me! The eternal sap runs in Ahab’s bones again! Set the 
sail ; out oars ; the helm !” 

It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked 
up by another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is 
thus continued with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus 
now. But the added power of the boat did not equal the added power 
of the whale, for he seemed to have treble-banked his every fin ; swim- 
ming with a velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under these cir- 
cumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely pro- 
longed, if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so long 
a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing 
barely tolerable only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself, 
then, as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermedi- 
ate means of overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made 
for her, and were soon swayed up to their cranes — the two parts of the 
wrecked boat having been previously secured by her — and then hoist- 
ing everything to her side, and stacking her canvas high up, and side- 


506 


MOBY DICK; OR 

ways outstretching it with stunsails, like the double- jointed wings of an 
albatross ; the Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby Dick. 
At the well-known, methodical intervals, the whale’s glittering spout 
was regularly announced from the manned mastheads; and when he 
would be reported ao just gone down, Ahab would take the time, and 
then pacing the deck, binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last 
second of the allotted hour expired, his voice was heard — “Whose is 
the doubloon now? D’ye see him? and if the reply was, “No, sir!” 
straightway he commanded them to lift him to his perch. In this way 
the day wore on; Ahab, now aloft and motionless; anon, unrestingly 
pacing the planks. 

As he was thus walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men 
aloft, or to bid them hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a 
still greater breadth — thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched 
hat, at every turn he passed his own wrecked boat, which had been 
dropped upon the quarter-deck, and lay there reversed; broken bow 
to shattered stern. At last he paused before it; and as in an already 
over-clouded sky fresh troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so 
over the old man’s face there now stole some such added gloom as this. 

Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, 
to evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place 
in his Captain’s mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed — 
“The thistle the ass refused ; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir ; ha ! 
ha!” 

“What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck?' Man, 
man! did I not know thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I 
could swear thou wert. a poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard 
before a wreck.” 

“Aye, sir,” said Starbuck, drawing near, “ ’tis a solemn sight ; an 
omen, and an ill one.” 

“Omen? omen? — the dictionary! If the gods think to speak out- 
right to man, they will honourably speak outright; not shake their 
heads, and give an old wife’s darkling hint. — Begone! Ye two are the 
opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is 
Starbuck ; and ye two are all mankind ; and Ahab stands alone among 
the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbours ! 


507 


THE WHITE WHALE 

Cold, cold — I sliiver ! — How now? Aloft there! D’ye see him? 
Sing out for every spout, though he spout ten times a second !” 

The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was 
rustling. Soon, it was almost dark, but the look-out men still re- 
mained unset. 

“Can’t see the spout now, sir; — too dark” — cried a voice from the 
air. 

“How heading when last seen ?” 

“As before, sir — straight to leeward.” 

“Good! he will travel slower now ’tis night. Down royals and 
top-gallant stunsails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him be- 
fore morning; he’s making a passage now, and may heave-to a while. 
Helm there! keep her full before the wind! — Aloft! come down! — 
Mr. Stubb, send a fresh hand to the foremost head, and see it manned 
till morning.” — Then advancing towards the doubloon in the mainmast 
— “Men, this gold is mine, for I earned it ; but I shall let it abide here 
till the White Whale is dead; and then, whosoever of ye first raises 
him, upon the day he shall be killed, this gold is that man’s ; and if 
on that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times its sum shall be 
divided among all of ye ! Away now ! — the deck is thine, sir.” 

And so saying, he placed himself half-way within the scuttle, and 
slouching his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals rous- 
ing himself to see how the night wore on. 


CHAPTER CXXXIII 

THE CHASE SECOND DAY 

At daybreak, the three mastheads were punctually manned afresh. 

“D’ye see him?” cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the 
light to spread. 

“See nothing, sir.” 

“Turn up all hands and make sail ! he travels faster than I thought 
for . — the top-gallant sails!— aye, they should have been kept on her 
all night. But no matter— ’tis but resting for the rush.” 

Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular 


508 


MOBY DICK; OR 

whale, continued through day into night, and through night into day, 
is a thing by no means unprecedented in the South Sea fishery. For 
such is the wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible 
confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nan- 
tucket commanders, that from the simple observation of a whale when 
last descried, they will, under certain given circumstances, pretty 
accurately foretell both the direction in which he will continue to swim 
for a time, while out of sight, as well as his probable rate of progres- 
sion during that period. And, in these cases, somewhat as a pilot, 
when about losing sight of a coast, whose general trending he well 
knows, and which he desires shortly to return to again, but at some 
further point; like as this pilot stands by his compass, and takes 
the precise bearing oi: the cape at present visible, in order the more 
certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen headland, eventually to 
he visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; 
for after being chased, and diligently marked, through several hours 
of daylight, then, when night obscures the fish, the creature’s future 
wake through the darkness is almost as established to the sagacious 
mind of the hunter, as the pilot’s coast is to him. So that to this 
hunter’s wondrous skill, the proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in 
water, a wake, is to all desired purposes well-nigh as reliable as the 
steadfast land. And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern 
railway is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in 
their hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a baby’s pulse; and 
lightly say of it, “the up train or the down train will reach such or 
such a spot, at such and such an hour,” even so, almost, there are occa- 
sions when these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep, ac- 
cording to the observed humour of his speed ; and they say to themselves, 
“so many hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, 
will have about reached this of that degree of latitude or longitude.” 
But to render this acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind 
and the sea must be the whaleman’s allies; for of what present avail 
to the becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill that assures him 
he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from this port? In- 
ferable from these statements are many collateral subtle matters 
touching the chase of whales. 


509 


THE WHITE WHALE 

The ship tore on ; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon- 
ball, missent, becomes a ploughshare and turns up the level field. 

By salt and hemp !” cried Stubb, “but this swift motion of the 
deck creeps up one’s legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I are 
two brave fellows ! — Ha ! ha ! Some one take me up, and launch me, 
spine-wise, on the sea, — for by live-oaks ! my spine’s a keel. Ha, ha ! 
we go the gait that leaves no dust behind !” 

“There she blows — she blows ! — she blows ! — right ahead !” was 
now the masthead cry. 

“Aye, aye!” cried Stubb; “I knew it — ye can’t escape — blow on- 
and split your spout, O Whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! 
blow your trump — blister your lungs! — Ahab will dam off your 
blood, as a miller shuts his water-gate upon the stream!” 

And Stubb did but speak out for well-nigh all that crew. The 
frenzies of the chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, 
like old wine worked anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings 
some of them might have felt before; these were not only now kept 
out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab, but they were broken 
up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares that scatter before 
the bounding bison. The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls; 
and by the stirring perils of the previous day; the rack of the past 
night’s suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which 
their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all 
these things, their hearts were bowled along. The wind that made 
great bellies of their sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible 
as irresistible ; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so 
enslaved them to the race. 

They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them 
all; though it was put together of all contrasting things — oak, and 
maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp — yet all these ran 
into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both 
balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the in- 
dividualities of the crew. This man’s valour, that man’s fear; guilt 
and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all 
directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did 
point to. 


510 MOBY DICK; OR 

The rigging lived. The mastheads, like the tops of tall palms, were 
outspreadingly tufted with -arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with 
one hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings ; others, 
shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking 
yards ; all the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for their 
fate. Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek 
out the thing that might destroy them ! 

“Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?” cried Ahab, when, 
after the lapse of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been 
heard. “Sway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick 
casts one odd jet that way, and then disappears.” 

It is even so ; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some 
other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for 
hardly had Ahab reached his perch ; hardly was the rope belayed to its 
pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made the 
air vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant 
halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as — much nearer to the 
ship than the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead — 
Moby Dick bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and in- 
dolent spoutings; not by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain 
in his head, did the White Whaler now reveal his vicinity ; but by the 
far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching. Rising with his utmost 
velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his 
entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of 
dazzling foam, shows ’his place to the distance of seven miles 
and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes 
off seem his mane; in some cases this breaching is his act of de- 
fiance. 

“There she breaches! there she breaches!” was the cry, as in his 
immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like 
to Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved 
against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for 
the moment, intolerably glittered -and glared like a glacier; and stood 
there gradually fading away from its first sparkling intensity, to the 
dim and fading mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale. 

“Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!” cried Ahab, “thy 


511 


THE WHITE WHALE 

hour and thy harpoon are at hand! — Down! down all of ye, but one 
man at the fore. The boats !— stand by !” 

Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like 
shooting stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays and halyards ; 
while Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly, was dropped from his 
perch. 

“Lower awa y,” he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat — a 
spare one, rigged the afternoon previous. “Mr. Starbuck, the ship 
is thine keep away from the boats, but keep near them. Lower, all !” 

As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first 
assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now coming for the 
three crews. Ahab’s boat was central; and cheering his men, he told 
them he would take the whale head-and-head, — that is, pull straight 
up to his forehead, — a not uncommon thing; for when within a certain 
limit, such a course excludes the coming onset from the whale’s side- 
long vision. But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all 
three boats were plain as the ship’s three masts to his eye; the White 
Whale churning himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as it 
were, rushing among the boats with open jaws, and lashing tail, offered 
appalling battle on every side ; and heedless of the irons darted at him 
from every boat, seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank 
of which those boats were made. But skillfully manoeuvered, inces- 
santly wheeling like trained chargers in the field ; the boats for a while 
eluded him; though, at times, but by a plank’s breadth; while all 
the time, Ahab’s unearthly slogan tore every other cry but his to 
shreds. 

But at last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so crossed 
and recrossed, and in a thousand ways entangled the slack of the three 
lines now fast to him, that they foreshortened, and, of themselves, 
warped the devoted boats towards the planted irons in him ; though now 
for a moment the whale drew aside a little, as if to rally for a more 
tremendous charge. Seizing that opportunity, Ahab first paid out 
more line : and then was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it again — 
hoping that way to disencumber it of some snarls — when lo ! — a sight 
more savage than the embattled teeth of sharks! 

Caught and twisted — corkscrewed in the mazes of the line — loose 


512 


MOBY DICK; OR 

harpoons and lances, with all their bristling barbs and points, came 
flashing and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab’s boat. 
Only one thing could be done. Seizing the boat-knife, he critically 
reached within — through — and then, without — the rays of steel ; 
dragged in the line beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman, and then, 
twice sundering the rope near the chocks — dropped the intercepted 
fagot of steel into the sea; and was all fast again. That instant, the 
White Whale made a sudden rush among the remaining tangles of the 
other lines; by so doing, irresistibly dragged the more involved boats 
of Stuhb and Flask towards his flukes; dashed them together like two 
rolling husks on a surf-beaten beach, and then, diving down into the 
sea, disappeared in a coiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, 
the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like 
the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch. 

While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out 
after the revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while 
aslope little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching 
his legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was 
lustily singing out for some one to ladle him up; and while the old 
man’s line — now parting — admitted of his pulling into the creamy 
pool to rescue whom he could; — in that wild simultaneousness of a 
thousand concreted perils, — Ahab’s yet unstricken boat seemed drawn 
up towards Heaven by invisible wires, — as, arrow-like, shooting per- 
pendicularly from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead 
against its bottom, and sent it, turning over and over, into the 
air ; till it fell again — gunwale downwards — and Ahab and 
his men struggled out from under it, like seals from a seaside 
cave. 

The first uprising momentum of the whale — modifying its direction 
as he struck the surface — involuntarily launched him along it, to a 
little distance from the centre of the destruction he had made; and 
with his back to it, he now lay for a moment slowly feeling with his 
flukes from side to side ; and whenever a stray oar, bit of plank, the least 
chip or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail swiftly drew back, 
and came sideways, smiting the sea. But soon, as if satisfied that his 
work for that time was done, he pushed his plaited forehead through 


513 


the white whale 

the ocean, and trailing after *him the intertangled lines, continued his 
leeward way at a traveller’s methodic pace. 

As before, the attentive ship having descried the whole fight, again 
came bearing down to the rescue, and dropping a boat, picked up the 
floating mariners, tubs, oars, and whatever else could be caught at, 
and safely landed them upon her decks. Some sprained shoulders, 
wrists, and ankles ; livid contusions ; wrenched harpoons and lances : in- 
extricable intricacies of rope ; shattered oars and planks ; all these were 
there ; but no fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one. 
As with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly cling- 
ing to his boat’s broken half, which offered a comparatively easy float; 
nor did it exhaust him as the previous day’s mishap. 

But when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon 
him; as instead of standing by himself he still half -hung upon the 
shoulder of Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost to assist 
him. His ivory leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short sharp 
splinter. 

“Aye, aye, Starbuck, ’tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who 
he will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has.” 

“The ferrule has not stood, sir,” said the carpenter, now coming up ; 
“I put good work into that leg.” 

“But no bones broken, sir, I hope,” said Stubb with true concern. 

“Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb! — d’ye see it? — But even 
with a broken bone, old Ahab is untouched ; and I account no living bone 
of mine one jot more me, than this dead one that’s lost. Nor white 
whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own 
proper and inaccessible being. Can any lead touch yonder floor, any 
mast scrape yonder roof? — Aloft there! which way?” 

“Dead to leeward, sir.” 

“Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, shipkeepers; down the rest 
of the spare boats and rig them — Mr. Starbuck, away, and muster the 
boat’s crews.” 

“Let me first help thee towards the bulwarks, sir.” 

“Oh, oh, oh ! how this splinter gores me now ! Accursed fate ! that 
the unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate!” 

“Sir?” 


514 : 


MOBY DICK; OR 

“My body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane — there, 
that shivered lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not 
seen him yet. By heaven, it cannot be! — missing? — quick! call 
them all.” 

The old man’s hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the com- 
pany, the Par see was not there. 

“The Parsee!” cried Stubb — “he must have been caught in ” 

“The black vomit wrench thee! — run all of ye above, alow, cabin, 
forecastle — find him — not gone — not gone!” 

But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee 
was nowhere to be found. 

“Aye, sir,” said Stubb — “caught among the tangles of your line — I 
thought I saw him dragged under.” 

“My line ? my line ? Gone ? — gone ? What means that little word ? 
—What death-knell rings in it, that old Ahab shakes as if he were 
the belfry. The harpoon, too ! — toss over the litter there, — d’ye see it ? 
— the forged iron, men, the white whale’s — no, no, no, — blistered fool ! 
this hand did dart it! — ’tis in the fish! — Aloft there! Keep him 
nailed — Quick ! — all hands to the rigging of the boats — collect the oars 
— harpooneers! the irons, the irons! — hoist the royals higher — a pull 
on all the sheets ! — helm there ! steady, steady for your life ! I’ll ten 
times girdle the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, 
but I’ll slay him yet !” 

“Great God ! but for one single instant show thyself,” cried Starbuck ; 
“never, never wilt thou capture him, old man. — In Jesus’ name no 
more of this, that’s worse than devil’s madness. Two days chased; 
twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under 
thee; thy evil shadow gone — all good angels mobbing thee with warn- 
ings: — what more wouldst thou have? — Shall we keep chasing this 
murderous fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged 
by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the 
infernal world ? Oh, oh ! — Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him 
more !” 

“Starbuck, of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee ; ever since that 
hour we both saw — thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes. But 
in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm 


515 


THE WHITE WHALE 

of this hand a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. 
This whole act’s immutably decreed. ’Twas rehearsed by thee and me 
a billion years before this ocean rolled. Tool! I am the Fates’ 
lieutenant; I act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou 
obeyest mine. Stand round me, men. Ye see an old man cut down 
to the stump ; leaning on a shivered lance ; propped up on a lonely 
foot. ’Tis Ahab his body’s part ; but Ahab’s soul’s a centipede, that 
moves upon a hundred legs. I feel strained, half stranded, as ropes 
that tow dismasted frigates in a gale; and I may look so. But ere 
I break, ye’ll hear me crack; and till ye hear that , know that Ahab’s 
hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe ye, men, in the things called 
omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore! For ere they drown, 
drowning things will twice rise to the surface ; then rise again, to sink 
for evermore. So with Moby Dick — two days he’s floated — to-morrow 
will be the third. Aye, men, he’ll rise once more — but only to spout 
his last! D’ye feel brave men, brave?” 

“As fearless fire,” cried Stubb. 

“And as mechanical,” muttered Ahab. Then as the men went 
forward, he muttered on: — “The things called omens! And yester- 
day I talked the same to Starbuck there, concerning my broken boat. 
Oh ! how valiantly I seek to drive out of other’s hearts what’s clinched 
so fast in mine ! — The Parsee — the Parsee ! — gone, gone ? and he was 
to go before : — but still was to be seen again ere I could perish — How’s 
that ? — There’s a riddle now might baffle all the lawyers backed by the 
ghosts of the whole line of judges: — like a hawk’s beak it pecks my 
brain. Fit, Til solve it, though!” 

When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward. 

So once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed nearly 
as on the previous night; only, the sound of hammers, and the hum 
of the grindstone was heard till nearly daylight, as the men toiled by 
lanterns in the complete and careful rigging of the spare boats and 
sharpening their fresh weapons for the morrow. Meantime, of the 
broken keel of Ahab’s wrecked craft the carpenter made him another 
leg ; while still as on the night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within 
his scuttle; his hid heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on 
its dial ; set due eastward for the earliest sun. 


516 


MOBY DICK; OR 

CHAPTER CXXXIV 


THE CHASE THIRD DAY 

The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once more 
the solitary night-man at the fore-masthead was relieved by crowds of 
the daylight lookouts, who dotted every mast and almost every spar. 

“D’ye see him?” cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight 

“In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that’s all. 
Helm there ; steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely 
day again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house 
to the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, 
a fairer day could not dawn upon that world. Here’s food for 
thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only 
feels, feels, feels, that's tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s 
audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or 
ought to be, a coolness and a calmness ; and our poor hearts throb, and 
our poor brains heat too much for that. And yet, I’ve sometimes 
thought my brain was very calm — frozen calm, this old skull cracks 
so, like a glass in which the contents turn to ice, and shiver it. And 
still this hair is growing now; this moment growing, and heat must 
breed it ; hut no, it’s like that sort of common grass that will grow any- 
where, between the earthly clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. 
How the wild winds blow it ; they whip it about me as the torn shreds 
of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to. A vile wind that 
has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells, and wards 
of hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as 
innocent as fleeces. Out upon it! — it’s tainted. Were I the wind, I’d 
blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I’d crawl some- 
where to a cave, and slink there. And yet, ’tis a noble and heroic 
thing, the wind ! who ever conquered it ? In every fight it has the last 
and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. 
Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand 
to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing — a nobler thing 
than that. Would now the wind hut had a body; but all the things 
that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are 
bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There’s a most 


517 


THE WHITE WHALE 

special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference! And yet, 
I say again, and swear it now, that there’s something all glorious and 
gracious in the wind. These warm Trade Winds at least, that in the 
clear heavens blow straight on, in strong and steadfast, vigorous mild- 
ness ; and veer not from their mark, however the baser currents of the 
sea may turn and tack, and mightiest Mississippi of the land shift and 
swerve about, uncertain where to go at last. And by the eternal Poles ! 
these same Trades that so directly blow my good ship on ; these Trades, 
or something like them — something so unchangeable, and full as strong, 
blow my keeled soul along ! To it ! Aloft there ! What d’ye see ?” 

“Nothing, sir.” 

“Nothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes a-begging! See 
the sun! Aye, aye, it must be so. I’ve over-sailed him. How got 
the start? Ave, he’s chasing me now; not I, him — that’s bad; I 
might have known it, too. Fool! the lines — the harpoons he’s towing. 
Aye, aye, I have run him by last night. About ! about ! Come 
down, all of ye, but the regular lookouts! Man the braces!” 

Steering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the 
Pequod’s quarter, so that now being pointed in the reverse direction, 
the braced ship sailed hard upon the breeze as she rechurned the cream 
in her own white wake. 

“Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw,” murmured Star- 
buck to himself, as he coiled the new-hauled main-brace upon the rail. 
“God keep us, but already my bones feel damp within me, and from 
the inside wet my flesh. I misdoubt me that I disobeyed my God in 
obeying him!” 

“Stand by to sway me up !” cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen 
basket. “We should meet him soon.” 

“Aye, aye, sir,” and straightaway Starbuck did Ahab’s bidding, and 
once more Ahab swung on high. 

A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. Time itself now 
held long breaths with keen suspense.* But at last, some three points 
off the weather-bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly 
from the three mastheads three shrieks went up as if the tongues of 
fire had voiced it. 

“Forehead to forehead I meet thee ? this third time, Moby Dick! 


518 


MOBY DICK; OR 

On deck there! — brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind’s eye. 
He’s too far off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake ! Stand 
over that helmsman with a topmaul ! So, so ; he travels fast, and I must 
down. But let me have one more good round look aloft here at sea; 
there’s time for that. An old, old sight, and yet somehow so young; 
aye, and not changed a wink since I first saw it, a boy, from the sand- 
hills of Nantucket! The same! — the same! — the same to Noah as to 
me. There’s a soft shower to leeward. Such lovely leewardings! 
They must lead somewhere — to something else than common land, more 
palmy than the palms. Leeward ! the white whale goes that way ; look 
to windward, then; the better if the bitterer quarter. But good-bye, 
good-bye, old masthead ! What’s this ? — green ? ay, tiny mosses in 
these warped cracks. No such green weather stains on Ahab’s head ! 
There’s the difference now between man’s old age and matter’s. But 
aye, old mast, we both grow old together; sound in our hulls, though, 
are we not, my ship ? Aye, minus a leg, that’s all. By heaven ! this 
dead wood has the better of my live flesh every way. I can’t compare 
with it; and I’ve known some ships made of dead trees outlast the lives 
of men made of the most vital stuff of vital fathers. What’s that he 
said ? he should still go before me, my pilot ; and yet to be seen again ? 
But where? Shall I have eyes at the bottom of the sea, supposing I 
descend those endless stairs ? and all night I’ve been sailing from him, 
wherever he did sink to. Aye, aye, like many more thou told’st direful 
truth as touching thyself, 0 Parsee; but, Ahab, there thy shot fell 
short. Good-bye, masthead — keep a good eye upon the whale, the 
while I’m gone. We’ll talk to-morrow, nay, to-night, when the white 
whale lies down there, tied by head and tail.” 

He gave the word ; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered 
through the cloven blue air to the deck. 

In due time the boats were lowered ; but as standing in his shallop’s 
stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent, he waved to the 
mate, — who held one of the tackle-ropes on deck — and bade him pause. 

“Starbuck !” 

“Sir ?” 

“For the third time my soul’s ship starts upon this voyage, Star- 
buck.” 


519 


THE WHITE WHALE 

“Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so.” 

Some ships sailed from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing, 
Starbuck !” 

“Truth, sir : saddest truth.” 

Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full 
of the flood; and I feel now like a billow that’s all one crested comb, 
Starbuck. I am old; — shake hands with me, man.” 

Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck’s tears the glue. 

Oh, my captain, my captain ! — noble heart — go not — go not ! — see 
it s a brave man that weeps ; how great the agony of the persuasion 
then!” 

“Lower away!” — cried Ahab, tossing the mate’s* arm from him. 
“Stand by the crew!” 

In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern. 

“The sharks ! the sharks !” cried a voice from the low cabin-window 
there; “O master, my master, come back!” 

But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; 
and the boat leaped on. 

Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship, 
when numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters 
beneath the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every 
time they dipped in the water ; and in this way accompanied the boat 
with their bites ? It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the 
whale-boats in those swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently 
following them in the same prescient way that vultures hover over the 
banners of marching regiments in the east. But these were the first 
sharks that had been observed by the Pequod since the White Whale had 
been first descried ; and whether it was that Ahab’s crew were all such 
tiger-yellow barbarians, and therefore their flesh more musky to the 
senses of the sharks — a matter sometimes well known to affect them, 
— however it was, they seemed to follow that one boat without molest- 
ing the others. 

“Heart of wrought steel!” murmured Starbuck, gazing over the side, 
and following with his eyes the receding boat — “canst thou yet ring 
boldly to that sight? — lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and 
followed by them, open-mouthed, to the chase; and this the critical 


520 


MOBY DICK; OR 

third day? — For when three days flow together in one continuous in- 
tense pursuit; be sure the first is the morning, the second the noon, 
and the third the evening and the end of that thing — be that end what 
it may. Oh ! my God ! what is this that shoots through me, and leaves 
me so deadly calm, yet expectant, — fixed at the top of a shudder! 
Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all 
the past is somehow grown dim. Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale 
glories behind me; boy! I seem to see but thy eyes grown wondrous 
blue. Strangest problems of life seem clearing; but clouds sweep be- 
tween — Is my journey’s end coming? My legs feel faint; like his who 
has footed it all day. Feel thy heart, — beats it yet? — Stir thyself, 
Starbuck ! — stave it off — move, move ! speak aloud ! — Masthead there ! 
See ye my boy’s hand on the hill ? — Crazed ; — aloft there ! — keep thy 
keenest eye upon the boats: — mark well the whale! — Ho! again! — 
drive off that hawk ! see ! he pecks — he tears the vane” — pointing to the 
red flag flying at the main-truck — “Ha ! he soars away with it ! — 
Where’s the old man now ? see’st thou that sight, oh Ahab ! — shudder, 
shudder !” 

The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast- 
heads — a downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had 
sounded; but intending to be near him at the next rising, he held on 
his way a little sideways from, the vessel ; the becharmed crew maintain- 
ing the profoundest silence, as the head-beat waves hammered and 
hammered against the opposing bow. 

“Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost 
heads drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no 
coffin and no hearse can be mine : — and hemp only can kill me ! Ha ! 
ha!” 

Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; 
then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg 
of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard ; 
a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled 
with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot length- 
wise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of 
mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell 
swamping back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters 


521 


THE WHITE WHALE 

flashed for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in 
a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk 
round the marble trunk of the whale. 

Give way ! cried Ahab to the oarsmen and the boats darted for- 
ward to the attack ; but maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that cor- 
roded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels 
that fell from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading 
Ins broad white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted to- 
gether ; as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats ; and once 
more flailed them apart ; spilling out the irons and lances from the two 
mates boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows, 
but leaving Ahab’s almost without a scar. 

While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks ; and 
as the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire 
flank as he shot by them again ; at that moment a quick cry went up. 
Lashed round and round to the fish’s hack; pinioned in the turns upon 
turns in which, during the past night, the whale had reeled the involu- 
tions of the lines around him, the half tom body of the Parsee was seen ; 
his sable raiment frayed to shreds ; his distended eyes turned full upon 
old Ahab. 

The harpoon dropped from his hand. 

“Befooled, befooled !” — drawing in a long lean breath — “Aye, Parsee ! 
I see thee again — Aye, and thou goest before ; and this, this then is the 
hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the last letter of 
thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship! 
those boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return 
to me ; if not, Ahab is enough to die — Down, men ! the first thing that 
but offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye 
are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me — 
Where’s the whale ? gone down again ?” 

But he looked too nigh the boat ; for as if bent upon escaping with 
the corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last encounter 
had been hut a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again 
steadily swiming forward; and had almost passed the ship, — which 
thus far had been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for 
the present her headway had been stopped. Ho seemed swimming with 


522 MOBY DICK; OR 

his utmost velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his own straight 
path in the sea. 

“Oh ! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now, the third 
day to desist. See ! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that 
madly seekest him!” 

Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly impelled 
to leeward, by both oars and canvas. And at last when Ahab was slid- 
ing by the vessel, so near as plainly to distinguish Starbuck’s face as 
he leaned over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about, and 
follow him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval. Glancing upwards, 
he saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the three 
mastheads; while the oarsmen were rocking in the two staved boats 
which had just been hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in re- 
pairing them. One after the other, through the port-holes, as he sped, 
he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flask, busying themselves 
on deck among bundles of new irons and lances. As he saw all of this ; 
as he heard the hammers in the broken boats; far other hammers 
seemed driving a nail into his heart. But he rallied. And now mark- 
ing that the vane or flag was .gone from the main masthead, he shouted 
to Tashtego, who had just gained that perch, to descend again for an- 
other flag, and a hammer and nails, and so nail it to the mast. 

Whether fagged by the three days’ running chase, and the resistance 
to his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was 
some latent deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was true, the 
White Whale’s way now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat so 
rapidly nearing him once more; though indeed the whale’s last start 
had not been so long a one as before. And still as Ahab glided over the 
waves the unpitying sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously 
stuck to the boat; and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the 
blades became jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, 
at almost every dip. 

“Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your 
oars. Pull on! ’tis the better rest, the shark’s jaw than the yielding 
water.” 

“But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!” 

“They will last long enough! pull on! — But who can tell” — he 


THE WHITE WHALE 523 

muttered “ whether these sharks swim to feast on a whale or on Ahab ? 

But pull on ! Aye, all alive, now — we near him. The helm ! take 
the helm ; let me pass,” and so saying, two of the oarsmen helped him 
forward to the bows of the still flying boat. 

At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along 
with the White Whale’s flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its 
advance as the whale sometimes will — and Ahab was fairly within the 
smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale’s spout, curled 
round his great, Monadnock hump. He was even thus close to him; 
when, with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to 
the poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into 
the hated whale. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if 
sucked into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically 
rolled his nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, 
so suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated 
part of the gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would have once more 
been tossed into the sea. As it was, three of the oarsmen — who fore- 
knew not the precise instant of the dart, and were therefore unprepared 
for its effects — these were flung out ; but so fell, that, in an instant two 
of them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its level on a comb- 
ing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again ; the third man help- 
lessly drooping astern, but still afloat and swimming. 

Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated, 
instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering 
sea. But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new turns with 
the line, and hold it so ; and commanded the crew to turn round on their 
seats, and tow the boat up to the mark ; the moment the treacherous line 
felt that double strain and tug, it snapped in the empty air ! 

“What breaks in me ? Some sinew cracks ! — ’tis whole again ; oars ! 
oars ! Burst in upon him !” 

Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale 
wheeled round to present his blank forehead at bay ; but in that evolu- 
tion, catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly 
seeing in it the source of all his persecutions ; bethinking it — it may be 
— a larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its ad- 
vancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam. 


524 


MOBY DICK; OR 

Ahab staggered ; his hand smote his forehead. “I grow blind ; hands ! 
stretch out before me that I may yet grope my way. Is’t nigh V ’ 

“The whale! The ship!” cried the cringing oarsmen. 

“Oars ! oars ! Slope downwards to thy depths, 0 sea, that ere it be 
for ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time upon his mark! 
I see: the ship! the ship! Dash on, my men! Will ye not save my 
ship ?” 

But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the sledge- 
hammering seas, the before whale-smitten how-ends of two planks burst 
through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat lay 
nearly level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew, trying 
hard to stop the gap and bale out the pouring water. 

Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego’s mast-head 
hammer remained suspended in his hand; and the red flag, half-wrap- 
ping him as with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, 
as his own forward-flowing heart ; while Starbuck and Stubh, standing 
upon the bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster 
just as soon as he. 

“The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet 
powers of air, now hug me close ! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, 
in a woman’s fainting fit. Up helm, I say — ye fools, the jaw! the 
jaw! Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long 
fidelities ? Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady ! helmsman, steady. 
Hay, nay! Up helm again! He turns to meet us! Oh, his unap- 
peasable brow drives on towards one, whose duty tells him he cannot 
depart. My God, stand by me now ! 

“Stand not by me, hut stand under me, whoever you are that will 
now help Stubb; for Stubh, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou 
grinning whale! Whoever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but 
Stubb’s own unwinking eye ? And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a 
mattress that is all too soft ; would it were stuffed with brushwood ! I 
grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Look ye, moon and stars! I 
call ye assassins of as good a fellow as ever spouted up his ghost. For 
all that, I would yet ring glasses with ye, would ye but hand the cup ! 
Oh, oh, oh, oh ! thou grinning whale, hut there’ll be plenty of gulping 
soon! Why fly ye not, O, Ahab? For me, off shoes and jacket to it; 
let Stubb die in his drawers! A most mouldy and over-salted death, 


THE WHITE WHALE 525 

though;— cherries! cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry 
ere we die !” 

“Cherries ? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, 
I hope my poor mother’s drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few cop- 
pers will come to her now, for the voyage is up.” 

Fiom the ship s bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; 
hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in 
their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; 
all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side 
strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of over- 
spreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, 
swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of 
all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead 
smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some 
fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the 
harpooneers aloft shook on their hull-like necks. Through the 
breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a 
flume. 

“The ship ! The hearse ! — the second hearse !” cried Ahab from 
the boat; “its wood could only be American!” 

Diving beneath the settling ship, the Whale ran quivering along its 
keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far 
off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab’s boat, where, for a 
time, he lay quiescent. 

“I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego ! let me hear thy 
hammer. Oh ! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine ; thou uncracked 
keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, 
and Pole-pointed prow, — death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, 
and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest 
shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I 
feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho ! from all 
your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole 
foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards 
thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I 
grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit 
my last breath at thee. Sink all coifins and all hearses to one common 
pool ! and since neither can be mine let me then tow to pieces, while 


526 


MOBY DICK; OR 

still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus , I 
give up the spear ! ” 

The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with ig- 
niting velocity the line ran through the groove ; ran foul. Ahab stopped 
to clear it ; he did clear it ; but the flying turn caught him round the 
neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bow-string their victims, he was 
shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the 
heavy eyesplice in the rope’s final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, 
knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its 
depths. 

For an instant, the tranced boat’s crew stood still; then turned. 
“The ship? Great God, where is the ship? Soon they through dim, 
bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gas- 
eous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed 
by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan 
harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And 
now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and 
each floating oar, and every lance-pole and spinning, animate and in- 
animate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip 
of the Pequod out of sight. 

But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the 
sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of 
the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, 
which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying 
billows they almost touched ; — at that instant, a red arm and a hammer 
hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the 
flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that 
tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural 
home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego 
there ; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing be- 
tween the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that 
ethereal thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept 
his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with unearthly 
shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive 
form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like 
Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of 
heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it. 


527 


THE WHITE WHALE 

ISTow small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen 
white surf beat against its steep sides ; then all collapsed, and the great 
shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago. 

ETYMOLOGY 

(supplied by a late consumptive usher to a GRAMMAR SCHOOL.) 

[The pale Usher — threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him 
now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer 
handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known 
nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow 
mildly reminded him of his mortality.] 


“While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what 
name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through igno- 
rance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the 
word, you deliver that which is not true.” Hakluyt. 

“Whale. . . . Sw. and Dan. hval . This animal is named from round- 
ness or rolling; for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted.” 

Webster's Dictionary. 

“Whale. ... It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. Wallen ; 
a.s. Walw-ian, to roll, to wallow.” Richardsons Dictionary. 


in 





Hebrew. 

K^ro? 





Greek. 

Cetus . 





Latin. 

Whcel . . 





Anglo-Saxon. 

Hvalt . 





Danish. 

Wal . . 





Dutch. 

Hwal . 





Swedish. 

Whale . 





Icelandic. 

Whale . . 





English. 

Baleine 





French. 

Ballena 





Spanish. 

Pekee-nuee-nuee 




Fejee. 

Pehee-nuee-nuee 




Erromangoan. 


528 


MOBY DICK; OR 


EXTRACTS 

(supplied BY a SUB-SUB-LIBRARIAN".) 

[It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grubworm of 
a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Yaticans 
and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to 
whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. 
Therefore you must not, in every case, at least, take the higgledy-piggledy 
whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel 
cetology. Ear from it. As touching the ancient authors generally, as well 
as the poets here appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertain- 
ing, as affording a glancing bird’s-eye view of what has been promiscuously 
said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and genera- 
tions, including our own. 

So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. 
Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world 
will ever warm ; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy strong ; 
but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and 
grow convivial upon tears ; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty 
glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness — Give it up, Sub-Subs! 
For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world, by so much 
the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Would that I could clear out 
Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye ! Bu-t gulp down your tears and 
hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts ; for your friends who have gone 
before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of 
long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here 
ye strike but splintered hearts together. — there, ye shall strike unsplinterable 
glasses !] 


“And God created great whales.” 

Genesis. 

“Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; 

One would think the deep to be hoary.” 

Job. 

“How the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.” 

Jonah. 

“There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to 
play therein.” Psalms. 

“In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword, shall 


THE WHITE WHALE 529 

punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked ser- 
pent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.” Isaiah. 

And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this mon- 
ster’s mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all incontinently that 
great swallow of his, and perish eth in the bottomless gulf of his paunch.” 

Holland’s Plutarch's Morals. 

“The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are : 
among which the Whales and Whirlpools called Balaene, take up as much 
in length as four acres or arpens of land.” Holland’s Pliny. 

“Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a 
great many Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared. Among the 
former, one was of a most monstrous size. . . . This came towards us, 
open-mouthed, raising the waves on all sides, and beating the sea before 
him into a foam.” 

Tooke’s Lucian, “The True History .” 

“He visited this country also with a view of catching horsewhales, which 
had bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he brought some to 
the king. . . . The best whales were catched in his own country, of which 
some were forty-eight, some fifty yards long. He said that he was one of 
six who had killed sixty in two days.” 

Other or Octher’s verbal narrative taken down 
from his mouth by King Alfred , a.d. 890. 

“And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that enter 
into the dreadful gulf of this monster’s (whale’s) mouth, are immediately 
lost and swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in great security, and 
there sleeps.” Montaigne, Apology for Raimond Sebond. 

“Let us fly, let us fly ! Old Hick take me if it is not Leviathan described 
by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job.” Rabelais. 

“This whale’s liver was two cart-loads.” Stowe’s Annals. 

“The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like a boiling pan.” 

Lord Bacon’s : Version of the Psalms. 

Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received 


530 


MOBY DICK; OR 

nothing certain. They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an incredible 
quantity of oil will be extracted out of one whale.” 

Ibid., History of Life and Death. 

“The sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward bruise.” 

King Henry. 

“Very like a whale.” Hamlet. 

“Which to secure, no skill of leach’s art 
Mote him availle, but to returne againe 
To his wound’s worker, that with lowly dart, 

Dinting his breast, had bred his restless paine. 

Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro’ the maine.” 

The Faerie Queene. 

“Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful 
calm trouble the ocean till it boil.” 

Sir William Davenant, Preface to Gondibert. 

“What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned Hos- 
mannus in his work of thirty years, saith plainly. Nescio quid sit.” 

Sir T. Browne, Of Sperma Ceti and the 
Sperma Ceti Whale. Vide his V. E . 

“Like Spencer’s Talus with his modern flail 
He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail. 

Their fixed jav’lins in his side he wears, 

And on his back a grove of pikes appears.” 

Waller’s Battle of the Summer Islands. 

“By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or 
State — (in Latin, Ci vitas) which is but an artificial man.” 

Opening sentence of Hobbes’s Leviathan. 

“Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a sprat 
in the mouth of a whale.” Pilgrim's Progress 

“That sea beast 

Leviathan, which God of all His works 


531 


THE WHITE WHALE 


Created hugest that swim the ocean stream.” 

Paradise Lost. 


“There Leviathan, 

Hugest of living creatures, in the deep 
Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims, 

And seems a moving land; and at his gills 
Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.” 

Ibid. 

“The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil 
swimming in them.” Fuller’s Profane and Holy State. 

“So close behind some promontory lie 

The huge Leviathans to attend their prey, 

And give no chance, but swallow in the fry, 

Which through their gaping jaws mistake the way.” 

Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis. 

“While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut off his 
head, and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come; but it will 
be aground in twelve or thirteen feet water.” 

Thomas Edge’s Ten Voyages to Spitzbergen in Purclias. 

“In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in 
wantonness fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which na- 
ture has placed on their shoulders.” 

Sir T. Herbert’s Voyages to Asia and Africa. (Harris Coll.) 

“Here they saw such large troops of whales, that they were forced to 
proceed with a great deal of caution for fear they should run their ship 
upon them.” Schouten’s Sixth Circumnavigation. 

“We set sail from the Elbe, wind N. E. in the ship called The Jonas-in- 
the-Whale. . . . 

Some say the whale can’t open his mouth, but that is a fable. . . . 

They frequently climb up the masts to see whether they can see a whale, 
for the first discoverer has a ducat for his pains. . . . 

I was told of a whale taken near Shetland, that had above a barrel of 
herrings in his belly. . . . 


532 


MOBY DICK; OR 

One of our harpooneers told me that he caught once a whale in Spitz- 
bergen that was white all over.” 

A Voyage to Greenland , a. d. 1671. (Harris Coll.) 

“Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife). Anno 1652, one 
eighty feet in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I was 
informed) besides a vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight of baleen. 
The jaws of it stand for a gate in the garden of Pitferren.” 

Sibbald’s Fife and Kinross. 

“Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this Spermaceti 
whale, for I could never hear of any of that sort that was killed by any 
man, such is his fierceness and swiftness.” 

Richard Strafford’s Letter from the Bermudas. 

Phil. Trans., a. d. 1668. 

‘‘Whales in the sea 
God’s voice obey.” 

N. E. Primer. 

“We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those 
southern seas, as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to the 
northward of us.” 

Captain Cowley’s Voyage round the Globe, a. d. 1729. 

. . . “and the breath of the whale is frequently attended with such an 
insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain.” 

Ulloa’s South America. 

“To fifty chosen sylphs of special note, 

<V"e trust the important charge, the petticoat. 

Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail, 

Tho’ stiff with hoops and armed with ribs of whale.” 

Pape of the Loclc. 

“If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those that 
take up their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear contemp- 
tible in the comparison. The whale is doubtless the largest animal in crea- 
tion.” 


Goldsmith, Nat. His , 


THE WHITE WHALE 533 

“If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them 
speak like great whales.” Goldsmith to Johnson . 

“In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it was 
found to be a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were then 
towing ashore. They seemed to endeavour to conceal themselves behind 
the whale, in older to avoid being seen by us.” Cook’s Voyages. 

“The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in so 
great dread of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid to men- 
tion even their names, and carry dung, limestone, juniper-wood, and some 
other articles of the same nature in their boats, in order to terrify and 
prevent their too near approach.” 

Uno Von Troil’s Letters on Banks’s and 
SolamdePs Voyage to Iceland in 1772. 

“The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce 
animal, and requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen.” 

Thomas Jefferson’s Whale Memorial to the 
French Minister in 1778. 

“And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?” 

Edmund Burke’s Reference in Parliament 
to the Nantucket Whale Fishery. 

“Spain a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe.” 

Edmund Burke ( somewhere ). 

“A tenth branch of the king’s ordinary revenue, said to be grounded 
on the consideration of his guarding and protecting the seas from pirates 
and robbers, is the right to royal fish, which are whale and sturgeon. And 
these, when either thrown ashore or caught near the coast, are the property 
of the king.” 

Blackstone. 

“Soon to the sport of death the crews repair : 

Rodmond unerring o’er his head suspends 
The barbed steel, and every turn attends.” 

Falconer’s Shipwreck, 

“Bright shone the roofs, the domes, the spires, 

And rockets blew self driven, 


534 


MOBY DICK; OR 

To hang their momentary fire 
Around the vault of heaven. 

“So fire with water to compare, 

The ocean serves on high, 

Up-spouted by a whale in air, 

To express unwieldy joy.” 

Cowper, On the Queen's Visit to London. 

“Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at a stroke, 
with immense velocity.” 

John Hunter’s Account of the Dissection 
of a Whale. (A small-sized one.) 

“The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the 
water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage 
through that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood gushing 
from the whale’s heart.” Paley’s Theology. 

“The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet.” 

Baron Cuvier. 

“In 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not take 
any till the first of May, the sea being then covered with them.” 

Colnett’s Voyage for the purpose of 
Extending the Spermacetti Whale Fishery. 

“In the free element beneath me swam, 

Floundered and dived, in play, in chase, in battle, 

Fishes of every colour, form, and kind; 

Which language cannot paint, and mariner 
Had never seen; from dread Leviathan 
To insect millions peopling every wave: 

Gather’d in shoals immense, like floating islands, 

Led by mysterious instincts through that waste 
And trackless region, though on every side 
Assaulted by voracious enemies, 

Whales, sharks, and monsters, arm’d in front or jaw 
With swords, saws, spiral horns, or hooked fangs.” 

Montgomery’s World before the Flood. 


535 


THE WHITE WHALE 

“Io ! Paean ! Io ! sing, 

To the Finny people’s king. 

Not a mightier whale than this 
In the vast Atlantic is; 

Not a fatter fish than he, 

Flounders round the Polar Sea.” 

Charles Lamb’s Triumph of the Whale. 

“In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the whales 
spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed; there — point- 
ing to the sea — is a green pasture where our children’s grandchildren will 
go for bread.” Obed Macy’s History of Nantuclcet. 

“I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form 
of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale’s jawbones.” 

Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales. 

“She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been 
killed by a whale in the Pacific Ocean, no less than forty years ago.” 

Ibid. 

“No, Sir, ’tis a Right Whale,” answered Tom; “I saw his spout; he 
threw up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to look at. 
He’s a raal oil-butt, that fellow!” Cooper’s Pilot. 

“The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that 
whales had been introduced on the stage there.” 

Eckmann’s Conversations with Goethe. 

“My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?” I answered, “We have 
been stove by a whale.” 

Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Whale Ship 
“Essex” of Nantucket , which was attacked 
and finally destroyed by a large Sperm 
Whale in the Pacific Ocean. By Owen 
Chace of Nantucket , first mate of said 
vessel. New York , 1821. 

“A mariner sat in the shrouds one night, 

The wind was piping free; 

Now bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale. 


536 


MOBY DICK; OR 

And the phosphor gleamed in the wake of the whale 
As it floundered in the sea.” 

Elizabeth Oakes Smith. 

“The quantity of line withdrawn from the different boats engaged in 
the capture of this one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or 
nearly six English miles.” . . . 

“Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which, 
cracking like a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four miles.” 

Scoresby. 

“Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the in- 
furiated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous head, 
and with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he rushes 
at the boats with his head; they are propelled before him with vast swift- 
ness, and sometimes utterly destroyed. 

... It is a matter of great astonishment that the consideration of the 
habits of so interesting, and, in a commercial point of view, of so important 
an animal (as the Sperm Whale) should have been so entirely neglected, or 
should have excited so little curiosity among the numerous, and many of 
them competent observers, that of late years must have possessed the most 
abundant and the most convenient opportunities of witnessing their habi- 
tudes.” Thomas Beale’s History of the Sperm Whale, 1839. 

“The Cachalot” (Sperm Whale) “is not only better armed than the 
True Whale” (Greenland or Right Whale) “in possessing a formidable 
weapon at either extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a 
disposition to employ these weapons offensively, and in a manner at once 
so artful, bold, and mischievous, as to lead to its being regarded as the 
most dangerous to attack of all the known species of the whale tribe.” 

Frederick Debell Bennett’s Whaling 
Voyage Round the Globe, 1840. 

October 13. — “There she blows,” was sung out from the masthead. 

“Where away?” demanded the captain. 

“Three points off the lee bow, sir.” 

“Raise up your wheel. Steady!” 

“Steady, sir.” 

“•Masthead ahoy! Do you see that whale now?” 

“Ay ay, sir ! A shoal of Sperm Whales ! There she blows ! There she 
breaches !’* 


THE WHITE WHALE 537 

“Sing out ! sing out every time !” 

“Ay ay, sir! There she blows! there— there— thar— she blows— bowes 
— bo-o-o-s !” 

“How far off?" 

“Two miles and a half.” 

“Thunder and lightning! so near! call all hands!” 

J. Ross Browne’s Etchings of a 
Whaling Cruise , 1846. 

“The whale ship Globe , on board of which vessel occurred the horrid 
transactions we are about to relate, belonged to the island of Nantucket.” 

Narrative of the “Globe” Mutiny , by Lay and 
Hussey, survivors , a.d. 1828. 

“Being once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried the 
assault for some time with a lance; but the furious monster at length 
rushed on the boat; himself and comrades only being preserved by leaping 
into the water when they saw the onset was inevitable.” 

Missionary Journal of Tyerman and Bennett. 

“Nantucket itself,” said Mr. Webster, “is a very striking and peculiar 
portion of the National interest. There is a population of eight or nine 
thousand persons, living here in the sea, adding largely every year to the 
National wealth by the boldest and most persevering industry.” 

Report of Daniel Webster's Speech in the U. S. 
Senate , on the application for the Erection 
of a Breakwater at Nantucket, 1828. 


“The whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a mo- 
ment.” 


The Whale and his Captors, or The Whaleman' s 
Adventures and the Whale's Biography, gath- 
ered on the Homeward Cruise of the “Commo- 
dore Preble” by the Rev. Henry T. Cheever. 


“If you make the least damn bit of noise,” replied Samuel, “I will send 
you to hell.” 

Life of Samuel Comstock (the mutineer), by 
his brother, William Comstock. Another 
Version of the Whale Ship “Globe” Narrative. 


“The voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in 


538 


MOBY DICK; OR 

order, if possible, to discover a passage through it to India, though they 
failed of their main object, laid open the haunts of the whale.” 

McCulloch’s Commercial Dictionary. 

“These things are reciprocal; the ball rebounds, only to bound forward 
again; for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the whalemen seem 
to have indirectly hit upon new clews to that same mystic North-West 
Passage.” From “Something” unpublished . 

“It is impossible to meet a whale ship on the ocean without being struck 
by her near appearance. The vessel under short sail, with lookouts at the 
mastheads, eagerly scanning the wide expanse around them, has a totally 
different air from those engaged in a regular voyage. 

Currents and Whaling. U. S. Ex. Ex. 

“Pedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect hav- 
ing seen large curved bones set upright in the earth, either to form arches 
over gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may perhaps have been 
told that these were the ribs of whales.” 

Tales of a Whale Voyager to the Arctic Ocean. 

“It was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these whales, that 
the whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the savages enrolled among 
the crew.” 

Newspaper Account of the Taking and Retaking 
of the Whale Ship “Hobomack.” 

“It is generally well known that out of the crews of Whaling vessels 
(American) few ever return in the ships on board of which they departed.” 

Cruise in a Whale Boat. 

“Suddenly a mighty mass emerged from the water, and shot up per- 
pendicularly into the air. It was the whale.” 

Miriam Coffin , or the Whale Fisherman. 

“The Whale is harpooned, to be sure; but bethink you, how you would 
manage a powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of a rope tied to 
the root of his tail.” 


A Chapter on Whaling in Ribs and Trucks. 


539 


THE WHITE WHALE 

“On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales), probably male 
and female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a 
stone’s throw of the shore” (Terra Del Fuego), “over which the beech tree 
extended its branches.” 

Darwin’s Voyage of a Naturalist. 

“ ‘Stern all !’ exclaimed the mate, as upon turning his head, he saw 
the distended jaws of a large Sperm Whale close to the head of the boat, 
threatening it with instant destruction ; — ‘Stern all, for your lives !’ ” 

Wharton the Whale KUler. 

“So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail, 

JVhile the bold harpooneer is striking the whale !” 

Nantucket Song. 

“Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale, 

In his ocean home will be 
A giant in might, where might is right, 

And King of the boundless sea.” 

Whale Song. 























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